ING Finex CFO of the year Meet 'The Navigator'

MANILA, Philippines - Grey pinstriped suit, steel-rimmed glasses, fine dining paunch, and an almost impenetrable corporate confidence. If this is your stereotype of a chief financial officer (CFO), then Delfin C. Gonzalez Jr. is a maverick in barong.

His calm demeanor and boyish smile defy the image of a man who carries the weight of three titles (CFO, group head of Finance, and Managing Director) in Ayala Corp., the holding company for the diversified interests of the Ayala Group and the Philippines’ most enduring business house with an untarnished track record of over 175 years.

Unlike many of his peers who started crunching the numbers at 21, Gonzalez is a late bloomer. Instead of a course in finance or accounting, he took up chemical engineering in college, which “turned out to be useful in my career in finance as I acquired the discipline of weighing the reactions or consequences of my decisions wholistically,” he says.

After graduating magna cum laude from the De La Salle University in 1971, he pursued his Masters in Business Administration at the Harvard Business School in Boston. Instead of getting a high-rolling career in the money centers in the USA, Gonzalez packed his bags after two years and followed his heart to his homeland. “It was really my plan from the beginning to go back to our country,” he adds.

His first job on his return was with San Miguel Corp. where he worked under the tutelage of “two young but transformational leaders” – Jose “Pepeton” Garcia and Francisco Eizmendi. At its Corporate Planning Group, part of his work involved preparing an analysis of the soft drinks business of the food and beverage conglomerate. His initiation to the world of finance was when he was transferred to head the Finance Group of the soft drinks division.

He stayed in SMC long enough to witness the spinning off of the soft drinks business as Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines, the joint venture with The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, the EDSA revolution, and the onset of the 1997 East Asian financial crisis. When he left SMC in 1999, he was already a full-fledged finance man. He joined some partners to form a company called Equity Managers Asia, but like most of its clients during a time of crisis, it, too, had a short life.

“We ended up handling the workouts of distressed companies. The companies that came to us were all nearly dying. This wasn’t what I wanted to do,” Gonzalez says.

When he was invited to serve as the CFO of Globe Telecom Inc. in 2000, he took the call. “It was a totally new field to me and highly technical. But it was a very exciting industry to be in. Unlike in SMC where you see the output of the business immediately when the beers roll out of the factories, in Globe, there was a lot to learn,” he explains.

It was the nascent stage of the country’s telecommunications industry. As such, he saw the company through its growth pains. Globe Telecom had only 2.5 million subscribers then, and had suffered from fraudulent post-paid subscriptions.

Some considered Globe as one of the riskiest investments of the Ayalas. And for a CFO whose academic training was in achieving chemical balance, Gonzalez found himself tackling his biggest career challenge. “We spent a lot of time convincing investors to fund the network expansion and explaining why it makes sense to roll out in the provinces,” he says. Not only was the company already grappling with a negative free cash flow, selling the idea of the prepaid service as core to the business, unlike in other parts of the world at the time, was really an act of corporate bravery.

To raise the huge capital investment needed, the company relied on a super CFO to navigate in the turbulent financial markets. Gonzalez says Globe resorted to hedging instruments to manage its foreign exchange exposures. It turned to the dollar bond market and pulled off a successful bond deal priced tighter than Philippine government bonds. And after five years since he joined the company, shareholders started reaping dividends.

Now the country’s second-biggest telco, Globe has nearly 30 million mobile subscribers and strong revenues of more than P60 billion. “Globe is now in its post-growth stage,” says Gonzalez. He admits being CFO of Globe now “may be tougher, considering that the competition is quite different as prices have gone down while the cost of service delivery with new equipment has dramatically gone down.”

His smooth navigating skills as CFO of Globe made him the first recipient of the ING FINEX CFO of the Year Award in 2007. Now on its fifth year, the award recognizes “heroes beyond the boardroom” whose excellence, strong leadership and stewardship have helped steer their organizations toward financial stability, benefitting not just their stakeholders, but also the domestic economy.

A testament to his boardroom heroism, Gonzalez continued to earn recognition as CFO when he moved to Ayala Corp. He was awarded “Best Chief Financial Officer” by regional publication FinanceAsia for five years until 2008.

Beyond the corporate walls, Gonzalez also applies his navigation skills in running a big family. At 62 with eight children, two of whom are still in high school, juggling work and family time takes more than a CFO’s skill. “When I was with Globe, my second daughter complained why she still didn’t have a cellphone while her classmates already had one, to think that her father even works at a mobile company. Still, I didn’t give in to her demand. You have to know when to reign them in while you still can,” he relates.

Globe may have lost the opportunity to add one subscriber at the time, but to the father of eight, raising a family may be the toughest but most gratifying job of all. As in everything else in life, his secret is achieving balance.