HispanicBusiness

Armando J. Olivera
President, Florida Power and Light Company
FPL Group Inc.
Armando Olivera is president of Florida Power & Light Company (FPL), the principal subsidiary of FPL Group Inc. and one of the largest investor-owned electric utilities in the nation with more than 4 million customer accounts. He was appointed president of the company in June 2003. Mr. Olivera joined FPL in 1972 and has served in a variety of management positions in the areas of transmission and distribution operations, fuels management, and strategic planning and resource allocation. Most recently he served as senior vice-president of Power Systems. During his leadership of Power Systems, FPL significantly increased service reliability, placing its performance within the top 20 percent of the industry. At the same time, the company's operations and maintenance costs per kilowatt-hour were well below the industry average. During that five-year period, FPL added 350,000 new customers, and Mr. Olivera oversaw a multibillion-dollar capital-expansion program to meet that growth and enhance overall system reliability.

Hugo Patiño
VP, Technology & Innovation
Coors Brewing Company
Hugo Patiño was named vice-president of Technology and Innovation for Coors Brewing Company in 2003. His current responsibilities include new product, package, material, and ingredient development, as well as the Coors-US strategies for technology and innovation. Patiño joined Coors' research and development team in 1984. He was promoted to director of brewery research and development in 1991. In 1993, he was promoted to vice-president of research and development. In this position, he was in charge of all brewing, packaging, container, and sensory research, as well as research related to international brewing, quality systems and quality assurance and the chemical analytical labs. Prior to coming to Coors, Patiño was an assistant professor of food science and technology at the University of California at Davis. He also spent three years as manager of brewing process engineering with Cuauhtemoc Breweries of Mexico. Patiño is a co-inventor of two patented malt beverages and lectures in brewing classes every year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the Master Brewers Association. He received an international award from the organization in 1990 for best paper in the packaging area. Coors gave Patiño an innovation award in 1990 for the design of a fermentation-control system. Recently he received the Professional Achievement Award by the National Hispanic Employee Association and the Hispanic Engineering National Association in 1997.


Roberto Peón
Chief Marketing Officer, International
BellSouth Corporation
Roberto Peón is chief marketing officer for BellSouth International. In this position, he leads BellSouth's growth in Latin America's wireless communications industry by guiding the deployment of new voice and data services and applied technologies across 11 countries. As part of that effort, he is responsible for the regionalization of the marketing organization across the 11 affiliates, ultimately leading to unification of services, branding, and practices generating important efficiencies. Previously, he was president of Brazil operations for BellSouth International and CEO of the company's cellular affiliate in that country, BCP Telecomunicações, from 1997 to 2000. BCP provides cellular service in metropolitan São Paulo, the world's third-largest city with a population of 18 million, and in northeastern Brazil, a region with a population of 26 million. BCP was considered one the fastest-growing cellular companies in the world.