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This year's superstars of corporate finance

LUIS JAVIER BASTIDA BANCO BILBAO VIZCAYA BILBAO

As BBV's CFO, Bastida, 52, is the junior member of a triumvirate renowned for its competence. Formerly head of strategic planning, Bastida played consigliere to chairman Emilio Ybarra y Churruca and chief executive Pedro Luis Uriarte Santamarina during Bilbao's much hailed but difficult merger in 1988 with Banco Vizcaya. He designed an integration program that effectively destroyed the feudal baronies of Vizcaya management, and since becoming CFO in 1993 he has introduced a system of rigid financial controls at BBV with a minimum of bureaucracy.

Bastida, an avid reader of contemporary Spanish fiction and a formerly ranked skier, created a coherent finance function where it did not exist before, and he reviews all the banks projects.While archrival Santander has spent a fortune moving aggressively into investment banking, Bastida has pushed management to stick largely with commercial banking; and, unlike Santander, Bastida and his team have won control of Latin American banks as cheaply as possible, often settling for controlling stakes rather than majority stakes. Bastida's focus on shareholder value has helped boost BBV's return on equity from 12.1% five years ago to 18.4%.

After earning a business degree at New York's Columbia University in the early 1970s, Bastida, like Uriarte, went to work for General Electric's legendary finance division in New York and Madrid. He became a fervid admirer of the rigor and discipline of GE's Jack Welch, then in charge of the plastics division but already influencing the entire company through his precepts of value investing.

KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA BIRLA, BOMBAY

When Business India published a review of 50 years of India's post-independence history, it included the Birla/AT&T deal amid landmarks such as the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Kumar Mangalam Birla-son of Birla's late founder Aditya Birla-made corporate history with the deal last October. He used a $504 million nonrecourse projectfinancing structure to create a global mobile communications system in Gujarat and Maharashtra states.The deal was India's largest telecommunications transaction.

Today, almost three years after the death of his father, K.M. Birla is shaking down the sprawling Indian conglomerate with his mandate to "focus on greater focus" and "attain the optimal structure for the huge organization.:As CEO, he manages a behemoth which makes everything from rubber gloves and textiles to cement and aluminum. His group reports net profits of 22,500 rupees ($560) every minute of the day from 13 countries.

At 30, Birla is one of Asia's youngest tycoons. He completed a charted accountancy course in Bombay before taking a senior management role in his family's Grasim Industries. He completed a postgraduate degree at the London Business School before becoming Birla chairman in 1995.

LE MIN CHUNG CHINA STEEL, KAOHSIUNG, TAIWAN

Chung, vice president for finance of China Steel, has been in a trial by fire since the company's partial privatization in 1996. In his first year at the newly commercialized enterprise, Chung, a former government bureaucrat and graduate of Arizona State University's Graduate School of Business, dodged Chinese missiles falling in the shipping lanes that China Steel used for transporting product out of Kaohsiung harbor. Chung was trying to raise debt financing to pay for a giant new furnace, but the saber-rattling forced him to use bank loans and operating funds instead to finance the NT$57 billion (US$1.7 billion) project. He was also restructuring the company, breaking it into five separate operations, both to guard against an unwanted takeover and to increase operating efficiency. China Steel is now expanding overseas-perhaps by acquisition in Malaysia or eventually, if the political situation improves, in China.The company has set aside NT$18.5 billion from operating funds to diversify inside Taiwan, targeting computer chip production, mobile phones, and banking.

Chung's biggest current challenge is Asia's economic crisis. Although the NT dollar has slipped only 21%, China Steel's revenues have plummeted. "Dumping by Asian competitors has pushed the price of steel down," says Chung, who is in his late 40s. Nevertheless, the company forecasts a 1998 pretax profit of NT$21 billion on revenues of NT$ 104 billion. But the company's stock price remains low, despite its strong financial position. "Everyone knows that the government, which owns 40% of the company, wants to sell its holdings down to 20%, so that keeps our price at a historic low, says Chung.

HUGH COLLUM

SMITHKLINE BEECHAM, LONDON

Collum, 57, is a key creator of the SmithKline Beecham corporate culture, a much copied model that eradicates barriers between research, marketing, and finance by organizing cross-divisional teams focused on getting a particular product out. Finance director at Cadbury-Schweppes, he was recruited to Beecham, then a sleepy drug company, as finance director by chief executive Robert Bauman in 1987. Bauman and Collum stunned the pharmaceutical industry by carrying out the first major "merger of equals" in recent times, hooking up with US-based SmithKline, a cash-poor but product-heavy rival, in 1989.The merger and $9 billion worth of subsequent purchases in the 1990s pushed SmithKline Beecham's market cap from $7 billion in 1989 to $40 billion today."The culture we've got here gets the finance people, the marketers, and everybody pulling with the scientists," says Collum. "We have a proactive finance department that helps get products to market, not just a bunch of number crunchers that look over people's shoulders and annoy them."

Analysts point to signs that the companywide model that suppresses ego is breaking down a bit: Bauman's successor, Jan Leschly, has seen potential mergers with American Home Products and Glaxo Wellcome break down this year over leadership wrangles. Colum is retiring at the end of this year, although he is in the market for nonexecutive positions and part-time consulting.

DING DONGHUA

CHINA TELECOM HONGKONG

Only a month after joining China Telecom last October, Ding oversaw one of Asia's greatest corporate triumphs in years-the launch of China Telecom. The largest equity offering ever out of China, the IPO was five times the size of its nearest Chinese rival, China Southern Airlines. Despite the queasy market conditions brought on by Asia's currency crisis, it was oversubscribed 18 times by institutions and 35 times by the Hongkong public.

Ding is a graduate of Beijing's University of Posts and Telecommunications where he majored in economics. Before joining the formerly state-run telecommunications giant as CFO in September, Ding was both chief economist and chief accountant at Guangdong Post and Telecommunications Administration.

The 61-year-old Ding has introduced advanced financial accounting practices to China Telecom, in line with international standards. "My aim is to establish a world-class telecommunications company which achieves the largest possible return for investors," he says. Today, China Telecom's shareholders include some of Asia's most powerful corporations: Cheung Kong, Henderson Investment, Kerry Holdings, CITIC, Hutchison Whampoa, Sun Hung Kai Properties, China Everbright, New World Developments, and Wharf Holdings.

BERNARD EBBERS

WORLDCOM, JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

It is not just that Bernie Ebbers is 6'4" and a former Canadian high school basketball coach. He also stands out as a Bible-thumping Southerner storming the telecommunications sector that not long ago was dominated by Ivy Lea