The
Best Enterprise
The Walkman, the VCR, the camcorder, the 3.5-inch disk, the CD —
Sony Corporation's record of innovation, global brand-building,
competitiveness and profitability makes it the best enterprise in
Asia for the past 25 years, and maybe the last century. Corporate
highlights from 1975 to today, plotted over Sony's share price.
The Best
Agency
The Manila-based Asian Development Bank has been the region's premier
development agency for 34 years. In its first quarter-century, it
lent $37.6 billion for 1,039 projects, everything from roads and
ports to school and industry upgrading. Loans approved last year
totaled $5 billion. In recent years, the ADB, which groups 58 countries,
42 in Asia, has taken on the "soft" side of development, like funding
a grant scheme to keep impoverished Thai kids in school. After the
Asian Crisis, the bank has refocused on reducing poverty —
still Asia's biggest bane.
— By Alejandro Reyes
The Best NGO
Bangladesh's 1974 famine got economics professor Muhammad Yunus
wondering how the poor and landless could be given a better chance
to improve their lot. A quarter-century and over $1 billion later,
Yunus's Grameen Bank has defined the only market-friendly answer
yet to that question — microcredit. Starting with modest collateral-free
loans to poor Bangladeshi peasants, microcredit has given millions
of Asians a start. Grameen Bank has engendered hundreds of similar
NGOs across the globe. As one academic described it, the poor man
and woman's lender has spawned "a silent revolution from below."
— By Dan Woodley
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