Chairman and CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, gestures during the annual shareholders meeting of the Swiss based giant food company in Lausanne.
(3 of 7)
Nonetheless, Nestle thinks it is undervalued--and is trying to broadcast that message. Soon after he was appointed chief financial officer last year, Wolfgang Reichenberger solicited analysts and investors for suggestions on what Nestle could do better, and the company has started publishing more detailed financial information, including sales-growth figures for some individual product categories.
The company invited 150 analysts to a seminar in Miami last October that was the highlight of its investor-relations campaign. But on the evening before the seminar started, Brabeck let slip over drinks that Nestle had an option to acquire the French cosmetics company L'Oreal in 2004. When the markets opened the next morning, Nestle stock tumbled on fears about what such an acquisition would do to its already growing debt. Brabeck kicked off the seminar with an angry lecture, complaining that his remarks had been misinterpreted and reading aloud extracts from the option agreement with L'Oreal--in French. "He was very emotional," says Andrew Wood, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein who was present.
Indeed, Nestle's stock has been particularly volatile because of concerns among investors that Brabeck's debt-financed acquisition strategy risks overextending the company. Nestle's net debt has quadrupled since Brabeck took over in 1997, to $13.8 billion in 2001, the latest year for which figures are available. The company has nonetheless managed to hang on to its top-shelf, triple-A rating, and Brabeck still gets some respect from Wall Street. "He's done well so far in keeping the top line bubbling and extracting better margins," Wood says. Wood and other analysts--including those at Goldman Sachs, which recently added Nestle to its list of recommended stocks--believe that Nestle could outperform its rivals in the next few years precisely because the company has so much room to improve its bottom line.
Brabeck didn't set out to be the CEO of Nestle when he began selling ice cream in his native Austria 35 years ago. He says he didn't even know that the company he worked for, Findus, was owned by Nestle at the time. "His ambition was to experience Latin America, to have an adventure there," says Gottfried Truppe, his college roommate. Why the fascination with Latin America? "The wide-open spaces and high mountains," Brabeck says. It was also far from home--and far from the mountaineering tragedy he had just lived through.
Brabeck was born in Villach, Austria, six months before the end of World War II. His mother Edeltraud Brabeck recalls rushing with her infant son to an air-raid shelter to avoid Allied bombs. In the tough economic times after the war's end, the surrounding Alps became Brabeck's playground. By age 10, he was climbing with ropes. As a teenager, he took off for hiking trips with his friend Hans Thomassen, with little more than a tarp and his mother's sandwiches. She recalls that "he was always an adventurer, just like his father"--a salesman for an oil company. Indeed, along with mountaineering, Brabeck today enjoys glacier hopping in a Piper plane with high wings and retractable skis.