 Jaime Chico Pardo, '74
Chief Executive Officer of Telefonos de Mexico
Cities: Mexico City
Jaime Chico Pardo, '74, has been Chief Executive Officer of Telefonos
de Mexico, S.A. de C.V. (TELMEX) since January 1995. He was part of
the group,
including Southwestern Bell and France Telecom, that put together the winning
bid in 1990 to buy Telifonos de Mixico, S.A. de C.V., as Telmex was then
known, from the Mexican government. During his tenure as CEO, he has not
only succeeded in bringing the company up to speed, he reinvented Telmex
as a global high-tech multimedia company.
Chico Pardo studied
engineering at Universidad Iberoamericana in his native Mexico to give
himself a technical background,
knowing he would
earn an MBA later. After graduating from Chicago Booth's Full-Time MBA
Program, Chico Pardo took a job at Banamex, one of Mexico's biggest banks.
He spent six years doing M&A work in the international division,
ultimately managing the operations of companies the bank acquired.
He then moved to London to become deputy managing director of the International
Mexican Bank (INTERMEX), a consortium of foreign banks that funded development
in Latin America. Wishing to move back to Mexico, he returned to Banamex
when they offered him a senior position. One month later, banks were
nationalized. And so, he spent the next two years as senior vice president
in charge of the international division, traveling a lot and convincing
people the bank was still a good credit.
Chico Pardo left Banamex and launched International Financial Engineering,
one of the first investment banks in Mexico, with two partners who had
been CEOs at private Mexican banks. After two years, Chico Pardo left
to partner with Carlos Slim, the wildly successful Latin American business
mogul, at Fimbursa, an investment bank. Their focus was companies that
either were in private Mexican hands or private foreign hands. One of
their first acquisitions was the Mexican subsidiary of Hershey. Chico
Pardo wound up running the chocolate candy factory in Mexico. Later,
he would head Nacobre, Euzkadi-General Tire de Mexico, and Condumex,
among other firms.
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