World’s best 100 CEOs: Why Africans were not recognized
Following the recent publication of the 2019 100 best performing Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in the world by Harvard Business review, no African was recognized in the list.
Taiwanese CEO Jensen Huang, who co-founded and heads graphics processor company, Nvidia, was ranked the best-performing CEO in 2019.
Coca-Cola CEO, Quincey harps on brand consistency
HBR in their publication, noted that when Jensen Huang cofounded NVIDIA, in 1993, he focused on a single niche: building powerful computer chips to create graphics for fast-moving video games.
As a result of more sophisticated calculations that developed quickly in Information technology, NVIDIA began spending billions of dollars on R and D to create chips that would support artificial intelligence applications.
Today, one look at NVIDIA’s stock chart shows how this bet has paid off. From late 2015 to late 2018, the company’s stock grew 14-fold, a performance that puts Huang in the top spot on HBR’s list of 2019 best-performing CEOs in the world.
Others who made it to the top 10, include; Marc Beinoff of Sales Force, Francois-Henri Pinault of Kering, Richard Templaton of Texas Instrument, Ignacio Galan of Iberdrola, Shatanu Narayen of Adobe, Ajay Banga of Mastercard, Joham Thijis of KBC, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Bernard Arnault of Moet Henessy, Louis Vuitton (LVMH).
The publication rated CEOs by their companies’ financial performance and factored in 30 percent of their environmental, social, and governance ratings.
In this analysis, the industries where these CEOs established their businesses were mostly in information technology, health care, financial services, real estate and consumer goods.
In some parts of Africa, the aforementioned industries are still struggling to improve and establish their market while others are yet to make a stable industry from it.
We have African billionaires who have more wealth than the poorest 50% or 650 million people across the continent, according to Oxfam International report.
The wealth of these billionaires did not push them on the list of best performing CEOs in the world.
In terms of health care, African governments face a number of challenges, including lack of funds and poor infrastructure. This is compounded by epidemics, poverty and the brain drain of homegrown doctors moving abroad, in search of higher wages and a better standard of living. Varying wildly from country to country and region to region, public health care does exist but most expats will want to use the private sector (often based in large cities and major tourist locations) or embark on medical tourism.
As Africa transitions from the margins to the mainstream of the global economy, technology is playing an increasingly significant role. Bolstering regional trends in business, investment and modernization, is the emergence of an IT ecosystem, a growing patchwork of entrepreneurs, tech ventures and innovation centres coalescing from country to country. However, we still need more of these innovations.
Africa is really expanding in the area of financial services but we need more hands and intellects to push us further to the world. Financial services is indeed a hot investment area, and one that is particularly dear to private equity firms operating in Africa. An Ernst & Young study found that the sector was rated the highest income investment values and the highest proportion of exits in the past five years.
According to a noted real estate analyst, Craig Smith of Anchor Stockbrokers, Africa’s top markets are “definitely a more attractive entry point than 18-24 months ago” but cautions that investors still need to exercise a “higher level of diligence” when investing.
African investors and aristocrats should increase their investments in these industries to further strengthen Africa’s economy.
