These are the most exciting times that Latin America can remember. Rules and regulations born out of its history of crises left its national economies well suited to weather the storm of 2008. Cheap money in the developed world has brought huge amounts of capital into the region. And demand for commodities, largely from Asia, has powered a surge in the value of its exports. Commodity sales to China now dominate perceptions of Latin America, and many of its most powerful business people work in this sector – especially in Brazil, which produces almost half the region’s generated wealth. There, oil and mining baron Eike Batista – himself the son of a mining tycoon – is emblematic of the old school. So, perhaps, is Sergio Gabrelli, CEO of Petrobras, who, after leading the state-owned oil giant through the world’s largest share offering, is in charge of a deep-water project that could catapult his country into the oil big league. Then there’s European-born Horst Paulmann, CEO of Chilean retailer Censosud, and Mexico’s Carlos Slim – the world’s richest man – who,aged 12 bought shares in a Mexican bank at his wealthy father’s behest. But the boom is also the story of the new middle classes, and of go- getting entrepreneurs with smart ideas. So here are the names to watch, from six of the region’s top economies, picked for their global influence or their flair for innovation. Vincent Bevins

Mexico
TATIANA BILBAO
Tatiana Bilbao

Architect Tatiana Bilbao has a new project to transform Mexico’s crowded urban spaces, and rural areas currently plagued by drug traffickers. She believes that by using architecture to reshape urban centres, she can reshape the culture of the country, and that the culture itself should shape its spaces.

Her designs are at the forefront of the sustainability movement, and away from Mexico City, where she is based, she recently completed a botanical garden in the state of Sinaloa. Having opened her studio in 2004, she is at the early stages of scaling her firm into a global business and has earned the recognition of Endeavor, which pioneered the concept of high-impact entrepreneurship in emerging markets. She has also launched her own sustainable non-profit organisation, MX.DF, to address Mexico’s urban problems.

Brazil
DANIEL TURINI
Crivo

Crivo, the software company Turini founded a decade ago with a fellow college drop-out, is revolutionising banking in Brazil and extending loans to its new middle classes. It assembles and compares all publicly available credit data, enabling banks to make informed decisions about granting loans, in spite of the barriers posed by Brazil’s legislation and bureaucracy.

Turini had to work hard to get around Brazil’s practically non- existent capital markets for start- up entrepreneurs, and he and his partners sold all their superfluous personal belongings to start Crivo with $200,000. Last year they brought in $16m in revenues and have just been tapped by one of the first ever Silicon Valley investors in Brazil.

Argentina
MARIANO SUÁREZ BATTÁN
Three Melons

Battán was not content to leave video game design to Americans and Europeans. When he founded Three Melons in 2005 – becoming ‘Captain Melon’, its CEO – Argentina had very little presence in the industry. But it struck big with its Lego version of Indiana Jones – check for it online – and moved successfully into social gaming. This caught the attention of Playdom, based in Silicon Valley, which acquired Three Melons last year, and then was acquired in turn by The Walt Disney Company.

Chile
CARLOS FERNÁNDEZ
Chile-IT

Even though he’s CEO of a government-backed non-profit organisation, Fernández is spearheading efforts to make the region’s most developed economy an IT hub. Helped by money from the state, the industry grew by almost 20% in 2010, and investment is running at $4bn (€2.8bn) a year. Specifically, Chile-IT is trying to take its member companies – such as Coasin Global Services, Datco, Eticsa, Excelsys, Ki Technology, NovaRed and Synapsis – to the US. Two years after the organisation’s founding, they and other Chile-IT clients earned $5m in US sales.

Brazil
ALEXANDRE HADADE
Arizona

With his brother Marcus and Guilherme Bruno, Hadade has turned a small graphics design firm into a leading name, providing services to the likes of Coca-Cola and Santander. Their company, Arizona, is working at the hi-tech end of design, customising the process as well as making it cheaper. The small company has grown quickly to 200 employees and has just expanded into Rio de Janeiro.

Mexico
BLANCA TREVIÑO
Softtek

In a region where men still dominate boardrooms, Blanca Treviño stands out as a successful tech industry CEO. Under her leadership, Softtek is Latin America’s largest IT provider, specialising in ‘near shore’ technology used for outsourcing within the region, rather than far away.

Softtek, which initially took advantage of Mexico’s proximity to the US, now has offices in Europe and Asia. Treviño says she realises that few women rise to the top in her world. However, she encourages other aspirational women to enjoy the challenge, rather than be discouraged by it.

Brazil
ANDRÉ ESTEVES
BTG Pactual

Starting as a lowly systems engineer, Esteves rose quickly through the ranks of investment bank Pactual, then sold it to UBS in 2006 for $2.5bn. In 2009, after forming BTG bank, he bought Pactual back for the same price, even though its book value had risen sevenfold. Now, as CEO of BTG Pactual, he’s overseeing some of Brazil’s largest deals, including the massive IPO of Santander’s local operation.

Mexico
GERARDO DE NICOLÁS GUTIÉRREZ
Homex

Like so many Latin American success stories, Homex has bet on the region’s rising consumer class. Founded in the city of Culiacán, in Sinaloa, far from Mexico’s economic capital, Homex has focused for 20 years on the construction and sale of homes in the entry and mid-level segments of the market. Now the company operates in 34 Mexican cities – taking leading positions in Tijuana, Guadalajara, Monterrey and the capital – as well as in BRIC countries Brazil and India, where it will team with local partner Puravankara to build housing projects.

Brazil
RANDAL LUIZ ZANETTI
OdontoPrev

Zanetti’s OdontoPrev, now Brazil’s largest provider of dental care plans, is going after the country’s under-serviced middle classes with creativity and gusto. The company has just made a deal with some of the country’s banks to sell dental plans directly to consumers, rather than through the big corporates alone, which only employ a small percentage of the population.

This kind of thinking is what has made OdontoPrev one of the Brazilian stock exchange’s biggest success stories, just two decades after Zanetti and two other founders threw in their own modest cash supplies. In the past year alone, its share price has more than doubled to a current market capitalisation of R$5bn (€2.2bn).

Colombia
JOSÉ FERNANDO VÉLEZ AND MARTIN SCHRIMPFF
PagosOnline

As the PayPal of Colombia, PagosOnline specialises in integrating local forms of payment – such as cash or bank transfers – into their online payment platform. In Colombia, the percentage of internet users has grown to 45% (from 11% four years ago) and the e-commerce market is growing 40% a year (to $600m in 2010) – yet credit cards are used by only 17% of the population. As the domestic industry leader, PagosOnline claims to have more than 5,000 clients, including e-commerce websites, retailers and airlines (40% of transactions are related to plane tickets). Now it has its sights on Latin America’s $28bn e-commerce market. It has started operations in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Panama and Argentina via its LatinAmericanPayments division and has a stable of international clients such as Sony, Telefónica and Amway.

Colombia
GIGLIOLA AYCARDI BATISTA
BodyTech

What better business strategy than organising and modernising the industry of bodily health on a continent always striving for physical perfection? BodyTech has done just that, taking advantage of a previously informal network. An idea that started as the MBA thesis project of Batista and partner Nicolás Loaiza Galeano is now one of Latin America’s largest gym chains, counting on more than 40,000 members across Colombia. They haven’t stopped at the borders, however, and recently expanded into Peru.

Brazil
NIZAN GUANAES
ABC Group

“We have to move from being a commodity country to building world brands from Brazil,” Guanaes said last year, and as the head of the country’s largest locally-owned publicity group, ABC, the legendary ad man is doing his best to do just that.

Worldwide, Brazil has long been a creative bright spot when it comes to advertising. Guanaes worked his way up from copywriter to business leader and oversees agencies in Brazil and the US. His groups are making a big push into digital, and making splashes at awards shows on both sides of the border.

Brazil
FABRICIO BLOISI
Movile

Movile provides mobile entertainment content, m-payments for virtual goods, marketing services and apps to “more than 100 million active users worldwide”. The company was launched 10 years ago as n-Time but changed its name following a merger with Brazilian communications firms Yavox and Cyclelogic. According to CEO Bloisi, opportunities in Latin America are huge since “mobile internet will be larger than the conventional internet, particularly in emerging countries”. The firm, based in São Paulo, has offices in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay.

Mexico
JAIME CATER
Health Digital Systems

In his topsy-turvy life, serial entrepreneur Cater has opened more than 30 different companies. He is hoping his current venture, HDS, will be the one that leaves its mark on the Mexican people. The company provides hospitals, clinics and state insurance providers with open-source software to digitise and share records, providing a much-needed technological upgrade for the country’s citizens. This venture is going much better than the other companies that have been shut down over the years. Since 2009, revenues have jumped more than 1,200%.

Chile
KARINA VON BAER
Oleotop

Karina von Baer is going after one of Chile’s most famous export industries from a unique angle and a unique location. Oleotop –which makes rapeseed, a type of salmon feed, in a poor region of southern Chile– is one of the few high-growth entrepreneurial businesses outside of Santiago. After witnessing an almost ninefold increase in sales in the past five years, von Baer’s business is reviving the area’s depressed agricultural sector.

Still under 40, von Baer has already done quite a bit to transform the area her traditional farming family is from, and doesn’t plan to stop there. Chile’s salmon industry, meanwhile, is the second largest in the world, with an annual growth rate of more than 10%.

Colombia
RODRIGO GUERRERO ROJAS
Dynamo

Funding is a perennial problem for Latin America’s film industry. In Brazil, the regional powerhouse, money either comes from the government or novela- dominated TV channels, making for two-dimensional movies.

Rojas and three colleagues saw opportunity in Colombia’s under-developed industry. Dynamo, the holding company they founded in 2006, consists of Dynamo Capital – Latin America’s only private equity fund for film – and Dynamo Productions, an all-encompassing movie factory.

Dynamo films have shown at the Monte Carlo and Sundance film festivals, and revenues have jumped 300% since 2009.

Argentina
MARCOS GALPERIN
MercadoLibre

In Latin America, eBay is not king. For used and hard-to-get items, people turn to Argentina’s MercadoLibre (called MercadoLivre in Brazil) or ‘Free Market’. It was a bold move in 1999 to found a rival to the California giant, but Galperin and his colleagues outperformed numerous rivals by emphasising local content and regional practices. In 2002, eBay finally conceded defeat, taking a stake and making the site its official partner. After an IPO in 2007, the company’s market cap now exceeds $2bn.

Peru
GARY URTEAGA
Equipar Medical SAC

Urteaga won the 2010 MYPE President Prize – the government’s top award for entrepreneurship – for his innovative approach to tackling one of the Andean region’s recurring problems: altitude sickness. His Equipar Medical company made big advances in hyperbaric chambers, which are used to treat the often severe complications arising from venturing up into the mountains. With tourism so important to the country’s economy, it’s easy to see why the government has been so grateful. To get the job done, Urteaga’s firm teamed up with New York’s Life Support Technologies. Today it researches, designs and manufactures local chambers in Peru.

Brazil
JOYCE PASCOWITCH
Joyce Pascowitch

Joyce Pascowitch is a fashion journalist who has turned herself into a brand in her own right and queen of a media empire. After years of penning newspaper columns, she launched the magazines Moda (Fashion), Poder (Power), Modo de Vida (Life) and the eponymous Joyce Pascowitch. This in addition to running the site Glamurama, increasingly a must-stop for Brazil’s young fashionistas. Pascowitch has positioned herself brilliantly at the nexus of two profitable trends: the rise of the Brazilian consumer and the rise of the Brazilian fashion industry.

Argentina
ANDRÉS ALTERINI
Smowtion

Smowtion, an online display ad network that helps niche sites and bloggers monetise their content, was founded in 2008 in Buenos Aires by Alterini, Mariano Elizari and Santiago Pinto. It now has outposts in Mexico City and Miami and is represented in Spain. The company claims to connect advertisers (from Adidas to Unilever) to 217 million unique users a month thanks to a network of 120,000 publishers. It launched in the US in April.