Manila Water's Nuesa named CFO of the Year

To the business community, an important question has just been answered. Who is the country’s top chief financial officer for 2008?

Last year, the country’s premiere organization of financial honchos, The Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (Finex) with ING Bank launched its search for the Chief Financial Officer of the Year.

This year, Sherisa P. Nuesa, managing director of the Ayala Corp. and CFO and treasurer of the Manila Water Co. succeeds Globe Telecoms’ CFO Delfin Gonzalez,  who took the honors last year.

With Nuesa’s win, the Ayala Group of Companies can claim back-to-back honors since she and Gonzalez are both CFOs of Ayala companies. Finex took extra precautions to assure that the independent judges would be totally objective in their choice.

Among Nuesa’s major accomplishments  was  her lead role in Manila Water’s IPO in 2005, which resulted in a hike in value of 250 percent. The IPO was 15 times oversubscribed, which led an international banking magazine to call it the “deal of the year.”

Her team at Manila Water was also able to raise more than $300 million in total borrowings and pre-IPO equity.

Since taking over as Manila Water CFO, assets of the public utility company have grown from P4.6 billion to P24.4 billion, while the company’s net worth rose from P2.2 billion to P14.3 billion.

Nuesa has been with the Ayala Group since 1975. A summa cum laude graduate of accounting from FEU, she earned an MBA from the Ateneo University.

She also took advanced studies in financial management at Stanford University, and advanced management at Harvard Business School. The Finex CFO of the Year is an annual search in cooperation with ING Bank, which is sponsoring the search in perpetuity.