MARIA SILVIA MARQUES

By IAN MCCLUSKEY

At Latin America's largest integrated steel company, it's not the blast furnaces that are shooting off the biggest sparks these days. It's Maria Silvia Bastos Marques, 40, an economist and financial wizard hired in May to restructure Companhia Siderurgica Nacional, formerly an icon of Brazilian state-driven industrialization and, since 1993, Brazil's largest privately owned firm. She has more than her share of work ahead at CSN, where she is leading what she calls an "internal revolution" that is likely to set standards for other Brazilian industries as well.

Before coming to CSN, Marques was finance secretary for the city of Rio de Janeiro--a job of Augean proportions. When she arrived in 1993, city coffers held a paltry $5 million. In two years' time, Marques--earning the epithet "the Billion-Dollar Woman"--turned Rio's battered fortunes completely around, cutting wasteful programs, renegotiating service contracts and declaring war on tax dodgers. By the time she left, the city's reserves were pumped up to $1.2 billion.

Marques' fiscal heroics made her a leading candidate to succeed Cesar Maia as Rio mayor in last October's elections, but she chose the steel-company job instead. Now her goal is to revamp the internal management at clanking CSN, whose steelworks began operating in 1946 in Volta Redonda, a town 100 km northwest of Rio. Marques is introducing new management policies--such as dividing the company into separate profit centers by product--that are virtually unknown to Brazil's insular corporate world. "If I don't watch out," she allows, "someone will start importing what I produce within three or four years. CSN will have to be as cost efficient as the Japanese and the Koreans."

In a country as avowedly macho as Brazil, can a soft-spoken female executive pull such an unwieldy behemoth together? If anyone can, it is probably Marques. Brazil's Finance Minister, Pedro Malan, calls her a "force of nature." A legendary workaholic, she stayed at her CSN desk right up to the day before her first children--twins--were born last October. "The doctor told me if I didn't stop working, I'd have had to leave [the office] in an ambulance," she recalls. Feeling that the standard four-month maternity leave was excessive, Marques was back at her desk exactly one month later.

--By Ian McCluskey