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We are devo

01 April 2001

AES' decentralized structure has bred unprecedented profits ? even in high risk markets. Why does AES go right where others go wrong? Taimur Ahmad talks strategy with AES CFO Barry Sharp and AES Enterprise President John Ruggirello.

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The AES approach slashes through conventional power industry management thinking ? a strategy rooted in a radically decentralized corporate structure, quite unlike that of most other industry contenders.
To begin with, no investment is centrally coordinated; executives in the field make almost all their own decisions; their decentralized management structure gives them a flexibility that has created some of the highest returns on equity in the industry. In fact, the company's return on equity has averaged 20% annually over the last five years, a trend that AES predicts will continue, and its market capitalization puts it around $28.5 billion.
Moreover, each project is treated as a separate business. Explains Barry Sharp, AES' CFO, ?the principle which is really fundamental to our discipline and which we've stuck to since the beginning is evaluating and thinking about each business on its own terms.?

What this means in practical terms is investing...


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