Brabeck-Letmathe, Peter

▪ 2004

      As head of Swiss-based Nestlé, the world's largest food company in 2003, Austrian Peter Brabeck-Letmathe likened his workday challenge to that of a world-class sprinter who measures improvements in just tenths of a second. As chief executive, his job was to keep a healthy company running even better. Despite a fall in global food prices, in the six years since he assumed the mantle in 1997, he had managed to cut manufacturing costs by $2.8 billion. Brabeck-Letmathe concentrated his efforts on fine-tuning the business rather than downsizing. During 2001–02 his appetite for acquisitions amounted to $15 billion; one of his most aggressive purchases, of the pet-food company Ralston Purina, was sealed in 2001 for $11 billion. His handiwork resulted in Nestlé's forays into bottled water and pet food but also in its abandonment of well-known brands such as Findus frozen foods and Hills Brothers coffee. Brabeck-Letmathe's latest effort was to get a handle on Nestlé's sprawling international empire by unifying practices throughout production, purchasing, and accounting. He still faced challenges, however, including mounting corporate debt and, in the view of some financial analysts, an underperforming stock.

      Brabeck-Letmathe was born in Villach, Austria, on Nov. 13, 1944. He was schooled in economics at the University of World Trade in Vienna. In 1968 he joined the Austrian arm of Nestlé through the Findus division, excelling first as a salesman of ice cream and then as a new-product specialist. His adventurous spirit gave him entry into Nestlé's South American operations in the 1970s and '80s, sometimes landing him in situations that were politically unstable. He rose through the ranks, scaling to upper-management positions in Chile (1970–80), Ecuador (1981–83), and Venezuela (1983–87). One of the challenges he faced in Chile was the effort to forestall government plans to nationalize milk production, which would have undercut the company's own milk products.

      Though he had returned to company headquarters several times before, in October 1987 he was drawn back to Vevey, Switz., to become vice president of the division of culinary products. On Jan. 1, 1992, he became executive vice president, with global responsibilities for marketing strategies. In this capacity, he reorganized Nestlé branding under six different headings, imposing a hierarchy that reached down to the local level. In June 1997 he was elected to the board of directors, and less than four years later he was appointed vice-chairman of the board. Brabeck-Letmathe also sat on the board of Credit Suisse Group, L'Oréal, and Roche Holding SA. An avid mountaineer, he scaled the Matterhorn in the Alps in 2002 at age 58.

Tom Michael

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