Six feet plus and no security in sight

There’s going to be some new old faces in the traditional after-the-New-Year cocktail hosted by Bangko Sentral Governor Rafael Buenaventura for fellow bankers.

Juanita Amatong will be attending as Finance Secretary rather than as Undersecretary while former SGV & Co. chairman Cesar Purisima will be attending as Trade Secretary.

Former Bank of America country manager Jose Querubin will be attending as chairman and chief executive officer of United Coconut Planters Bank. (Former UCPB chairman Edward Go isn’t expected to show up). This will also be a first for Citibank’s country corporate head James Hunt. (Jim Hunt’s counterpart in consumer bank Nina Aguas normally doesn’t attend).

Oh yes, this will probably be the last one attended by outgoing National Treasurer Sergio Edeza, who will folllow the route taken by the guy who brought him back to government, former Finance Secretary Jose Isidro Camacho, as well as of outgoing Philippine Stock Exchange president Ernest Leung.

Since he has reached the Ayala Group’s mandatory retirement age of 60, it is also just a question of time before a replacement is found for Bank of the Philippine Islands president and chief executive officer Xavier Loinaz (who will, of course, be kicked upstairs).

* * *

When Coca-Cola Export Co. chief executive officer Alex Von Behr asked to accompany newly appointed Coca-Cola Bottlers Phils., Inc. president Roberto Huang on his provincial rounds (there seems to be one every week), Bobby Huang placed two conditions. One, Mr. Von Behr would have to ditch his security. Two, he would have to wear the CCBPI uniform – the white shirt jack like everybody else.

An old hand at Coke bottling, Mr. Von Behr not only agreed to wear the uniform, he also insisted on squeezing in his six-feet-plus frame Mr. Huang and the salesman in the regular CCBPI sales vehicle instead of riding in comfort in a van provided for him.

The CCBPI distribution network is patterned after that of San Miguel Corp., in large part because Mr. Huang used to be San Miguel’s national sales director. (Toto Bitanga, who used to handle beer sales in Mindanao, has since taken over that job).

At the heart of the reorganized distribution system is a retail trade audit conducted by a non-SMC company. The audit tells management, among other things, how many retail and wholesale outlets there are in every barangay in the country, how much of a particular San Miguel product (in this case, carbonated and non-carbonated drinks) each outlet historically sells in a given time, and how much each outlet can potentially push – data any politician in next year’s presidential election might find very useful, indeed.

Using the audit, Mr. Huang and his bright boys can then set reasonable quotas for its distributors, who are assigned both wholesalers and retailers in a specific territory. The system also brings order (and protection) to the network, which has been characterized in the past by distributors undercutting or grabbing business from each other.