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CompanyStats

América Móvil
  • HQ: Mexico
  • 2008 Revenues: $25.1 billion
  • Employees: 52,879
  • Global: 18 countries
  • Fortune 500: N.A.

CEOExtra

The key to success in a region with significant financial volatility, says America Movil CEO Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, is having a solid balance sheet. “Keeping leverage down, maintaining adequate liquidity, stretching out debt amortizations — mindful of the importance of avoiding the bunching of maturities — and not taking undue foreign exchange risks,” he explains, adding that “investments are a necessary condition for growth.” But while the CEO looks to the future, he asserts that his feet are firmly planted in the present. “This will be a particularly tough year that may bring about a slowdown in subscriber growth or even reduce usage in some countries,” he cautions. “But we are in a very strong position to withstand the turbulence and will emerge even stronger from it.”

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Daniel Hajj Aboumrad

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Daniel Hajj Aboumrad

América Móvil

What are the opportunities for Business in Latin America?

In 2000 only 12 percent of Latin Americans had cell phones. By the end of last year, says Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, CEO of América Móvil S.A.B. de C.V. (AMX), that number had grown to more than 80 percent (compared with nearly 90 percent in the U.S. and 65 percent in Canada). Through acquisitions and heavy financial investments to increase the coverage and capacity of its networks, Aboumrad says, América Móvil has become the leading wireless-services provider in Latin America. With $28.5 billion in 2008 sales, it operates in 18 countries while serving more than 186 million mobile customers.

“We are only beginning to fulfill the needs of a market that for the most part does not have access to the Internet but is eager to send e-mails, pay bills and buy movie tickets through mobile phones.”

Although Aboumrad believes that growth will continue, he says it will be paced differently. “In our first years of operation, we had our hands full expanding our footprint in the Americas and building out coverage in all of our operations,” he explains. “Some markets doubled or tripled in size over a 12-month span.” New revenue, he believes, will increasingly come from the wireless broadband and data services that Mexico-based América Móvil can offer, driven by technologies that provide higher data-transmission speeds and a wider variety of smartphones. “We are only beginning to fulfill the needs of a market that for the most part does not have access to the Internet but is eager to send e-mails, pay bills and buy movie tickets through their mobile phones.”