WHEN BANCO ESPÍRITO Santo (BES), the banking unit of Portugal’s Espírito Santo Financial Group (ESFG), announced on May 18 that it expected compound annual growth of 20% a year until 2010, investors saluted its confidence and sent the shares higher – BES’s by 2.23% and ESFG’s by 1.8% – feeling justified in their valuation of the bank at a higher multiple than rivals such as Millennium BCP and Banco BPI.
Yet BES and ESFG – the latter also controls non-life insurance company Tranquilidade and other businesses – have hardly been an overnight success. "We have grown fairly consistently over the past 15 years but because of where we operate and our size, we are only rediscovered by analysts and investors on an intermittent basis," says Manuel Villas-Boas, director and president of the executive committee of ESFG based in...
