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Solid performers that buck the trend

When emerging markets go wobbly, strong, solidly performing companies are thrown into relief. Euromoney looks at nine of Latin America's best. They have in common steady demand for their products and services but also a determination to seek efficiency and financial soundness. Alex Mathias reports.

Solid performers that buck the trend

Although the Greek government's macroeconomic policy continues to alienate the electorate, investors are being attracted in their droves to an economy now firmly on track for meeting the European Union's Maastricht criteria by 2001. International confidence is growing rapidly, evidenced not least by the performance of Greek equities and bonds. Philip Moore reports.

The key to the gate of heaven, runs a Buddhist proverb, is also the key which could open the gate of hell. Buddha wasn't specifically talking about capital account convertibility when he made this statement. But he could have been.

Blue chips of the future

Chinese premier Zhu Rongji had been slowly drawing the net around the country's second biggest investment and trust company long before the outside world or indeed the company's own executives knew what was happening. He sent trusted aides to Guangdong where they worked quietly for months to flush out financial irregularities and clean up the scandal-ridden province. Their investigations led to the shutdown of Guangdong International Trust and Investment Company (Gitic).

Mohamed Taymour was in the top 0.1% of high-school students in Egypt the year he graduated. At the time, engineering was the fashionable next step up the educational ladder. So to please his father and gain useful mathematical skills Taymour opted to study industrial engineering instead of of commerce, already his true love.

Solid performers that buck the trend

Making a career in Brazilian equities in the City of London might seem a job for an inward-looking intellectual who likes reading and doesn't mind waiting for the telephone to ring. But Stephen Rose, a quintessential Englishman, is quite the opposite - he is outgoing, gregarious and more likely to be ringing you. These qualities enabled him to build his brokerage, Stephen Rose & Partners, to the point where it attracted interest from Brazil's third-largest private bank, Unibanco, which bought the business two years ago.

As the markets began to crumble around Wall Street executives in late August, former Salomon Brothers chairman and chief executive officer Deryck Maughan was in a good mood. "He seemed tickled pink that he had sold the firm a year earlier," says David Berry, an analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods, recalling a conversation with Maughan.

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