WorldCity Business Magazine

Brightstar's big ambitions

by Doreen Hemlock

Getting up at four in the morning for a conference call with Australia can really mess up a work day in Miami. So can rushing off on a Friday afternoon to catch a transcontinental flight in order to make it to a meeting Monday morning, Asia-Pacific time. But R. Marcelo Claure, CEO of Miami-based Brightstar Corp., relishes every chance to make his business truly global.

In just eight years, he’s built Brightstar into the largest cell-phone distributor in the Americas, a fast-growing giant with sales of $2.3 billion in 2005 and exports so hefty that his company ranks as the No. 1 exporter among U.S. Hispanic-owned businesses.

Claure also has partnered with companies like Google in a venture to bring $100 laptops to children in poor countries. And his circle of friends includes such heavyweights as Spanish Prime Minister Jos Mara Aznar and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte.

Only 38 years old, the 6-foot-6-inch entrepreneur has grand ambitions. He wants to transform Brightstar into the world’s biggest cell-phone distributor and the largest U.S. Hispanic-owned business even if it means a huge shift in his own role. Instead of “steering a small boat,” Claure feels he’s now at the helm of a cruise ship. He says he now needs to recruit talent and delegate more duties to top executives.

“As long as it’s challenging, this is fun,” he says. But there are scary times, too, such as a recent business coup in Australia. Brightstar picked up an exclusive contract to handle all the cell-phone supply operations from purchasing to warehousing and distribution of Aussie phone giant Telstra. The deal involves at least 2 million phones a year. It also means adjusting his life to the 12- to 16-hour time difference with Australia.

“Your business runs 24 hours a day, and you can’t tell your customer, I have to wait until my Miami office opens,’” he explains.

To build the Australia business and expand throughout the booming Asia-Pacific region, Claure would have liked to send his top staff from Latin America, managers he trusts and who understand both how the industry works and how Brightstar operates. But many of those Latin American executives don’t speak English well enough.

“I am a person who doesn’t like opportunities to pass by us, and now we have opportunities to open in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and other countries,” Claure explains. ”[But] for the first time, I’m saying maybe I’m going to have to pass or do that in six months or a year. That frustrates me.”

As the son of a Bolivian diplomat who lived in several countries as a child, Claureunderstands the value of hiring managers who know their local markets. His ideal employee is someone “who is a good strategist and good tactical person, who can think and execute.” But he says it is difficult to find that mix in one person.

Some strategists don’t like to get their hands dirty, while some workhorses don’t like to think on their own. A resume doesn’t reveal where someone falls along that spectrum. “I’ve never seen a bad resume in my life,” jokes Claure.

Associates say the Brightstar chief is the kind of employee he’s looking for: both a thinker and a doer. He works outrageous hours, often arriving at his Miami office before 8 a.m. and laboring until 10 at night before continuing his work at home and on weekends.

Claure says he’s always loved working. As a teenager in Bolivia, he sold spaghetti and soups from a family factory at a local market to make money. And in college in Boston, he traded frequent flier miles to pocket extra cash.

He even works passionately on projects that bring him no money. Just after college, Claure used his own money and raised more to help Guido Loayza, the head of Bolivia’s Soccer League, boost training and qualify Bolivia for the 1994 World Cup.

When Bolivia played Germany in the World Cup opener in Chicago, Claure met then U.S.-President Bill Clinton and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He describes that year “as probably the happiest in the history of Bolivia and the happiest in my life. It was a blast.”**

Claure had the foresight to tap a fast-growing industry, which the Bolivian calls “the coolest business in the world.” The Brightstar chief estimates that 900 million cell phones will be sold this year and that rate will only grow. “In India, with 1 billion people, just 5 percent have phones, and in China, 20 percent,” he says.

Analysts say Claure has outpaced rivals by skillfully forging links both with phone makers like Motorola Corp. and phone company operators like Spain’s Telefnica. His team studies the businesses of each client and finds ways to personalize services so the clients can concentrate on their core activities. With Telstra, for instance, Brightstar is handling cell-phone buying and sales so the Australian company can focus on phone service.

“Brightstar has been more effective than their competitors in building strong relationships with vendors and operators and does a lot of customization, including just-in-time billing,’ says Marc Einstein, a senior analyst for the Americas at Pyramid Research in Cambridge, Mass.

Indeed, Brightstar’s relationships are so solid that company stands poised to follow operators like Telefnica out of Latin America and into such regions as Eastern Europe or Africa, Einstein notes.

Claure says he had no choice but to broaden the scope of his company. Simply selling someone else’s phones seemed a strategy doomed to fail. “If you are the middleman, and that’s what we were, you can’t sleep well because you know sooner or later the producer and the buyer are going to connect,” Claure says. “And they’re going to ask, Why is this guy in the middle making all this money?’”

Brightstar now offers so many services from phone assembly to funding new projects to inventory management that it’s hard to keep up with it all. “What keeps me up at night now is: How am I going to answer all the emails I have to answer? How am I going to find a superstar? Where am I going to put our next factory?” Claure reveals.

Then, there’s the question of financing growth. Claure considered a stock offering on Wall Street several years ago before the dot-com bust and tech slump sent investors scurrying from tech companies. Last year, Brightstar raised more than $61 million in a private placement of securities, and Claure is relieved that he never went public.

“I’m the happiest person that we got off that train at the right moment,” he says. ” I think I was being an idiot, for it was more of personal [glory] thing, doing an IPO,” he says. “And the fact you can go to jail because somebody else makes a mistake on the books [with a public company]. It’s not worth it.”

Of course, Claure knows the cell-phone sales boom may slow one day. He’s set up a unit within Brightstar to fund what he describes as “crazy” projects: new products and services. He’s been lucky with one, the Firefly a child-sized cell phone that glows.

Brightstar invested a “couple of million dollars” in the company developing the kid-sized phone. Brightstar now distributes Firefly phones, which feature five programmable keys and lots of lights, sound and animation. Firefly clients run the range from phone company operators worldwide to stores like Toys R Us.

Claure also moves into manufacturing when opportunities arise. For example, Brightstar has seized on incentives to assemble Motorola phones in Argentina’s southernmost province, Tierra del Fuego, for sale within Argentina.

“Marcelo is willing to take those risks,” says Fernando Gomez, president of Motorola Latin America, noting that Motorola prefers larger, consolidated factories. “He’s full of energy, always on the job and always looking for how to grow his business.”

Not all Claure’s focus is far flung. Closer to home, Brightstar has joined with Cisneros Group’s Movida Communications in a venture to sell cell phones to the 40 million-plus Hispanics in the United States.

The desire to become the U.S. Hispanic-owned company with the biggest annual sales clearly drives Claure. “We thought we’d be the first Hispanic company to ever break the $2 billion mark, and then Jorge Perez shows up with those numbers,” Claure says, referring to the head of Related Group, a Miami-based condo builder. “That was not supposed to happen.

“Next year, we’re going to break $3 billion in sales,” Claure adds.