Navarinoinvestment best CEOs of 2014

CEO:Chief executive officer

A chief executive officer (CEO) is generally the most senior corporate officer (executive) or administrator in charge of managing a for-profit organization. The CEO of a corporation or company typically reports to the board of directors and is charged with maximizing the value of the entity. Titles often used as synonyms for CEO include president, managing director (MD) and chief executive (CE).

Source:wikipedia 

Jack Ma, Alibaba

Jack Ma might have been the happiest man in the world the day his Chinese e-commerce company, Alibaba

(BABA), IPO'd. Alibaba's was the largest IPO in history and made more than $25 billion. "This is the first Chinese company that has come to America and is getting on the playing field with Facebook, Google and Amazon," says Finkelstein. The stock is up nearly 20% since it IPO'd in September and has grown its total revenue by 53.7% to $2.74 billion in 2014. Ma has also managed to grow mobile revenue by more than 1,000%, according to Finkelstein. "What I've always liked about the guy is that he has one of those rags-to-riches stories... I think he's really authentic," he says. 

 

Marissa Mayer,Yahoo!

 She spent most of her career at Google, going from one of its early engineers to Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services. A self-described “proud geek,” she holds a B.S. in symbolic engineering (studying interactions between human and artificial intelligences) and an M.S. in computer science, both from Stanford. In 1999, she joined a fledgling Silicon Valley startup as one of the company’s first twenty employees and its first female engineer. Mayer was a key player in the design of Google’s era-defining homepage; her logic and design sense are now woven into the daily lives of people at every corner of the globe. In her years heading Google's search business, she helped expand usage from a few hundred thousand searches per day to over a billion.

 Now is the woman who put Yahoo! again in the ''game''...

 Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX

Elon Musk is nothing if not innovative and his company SpaceX, once thought of as a pie-in-the-sky idea, has won major government contracts this year and operated numerous successful trips to space. Tesla (TSLA), a company that was up 344% in 2013 managed to stay in the green -- rising by another 45%. "Tesla has a business model that's unbeatable," says Finkelstein. "They're growing -- last year was even better than this year... when the history books are written [Musk is] on line to be one of the small number of people that we're going to look back on and say 'this guy really changed the world.'"

 

Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts

Andrew Wilson has perfected the art of the turnaround. Electronic Arts (EA), which produces video games like Madden NFL and The Sims, was voted the "worst company in America" by consumerist in both 2012 and 2013. But in 2014 the stock is up nearly 106%. Wilson took over as CEO in September of 2013 and "he took the company back to principals like putting your customer first," says Finkelstein. Wilson also set up a model where all play was free and focused on mobile and international markets. "It doesn't sound complicated but they weren't doing it before," comments Finkelstein. "This is basic solid management."

John Martin, Gilead Sciences

Finkelstein writes that Martin, "successfully brought Sovaldi [a drug that fights Hepatitis C, but controversially costs $95,000 per treatment] to market and embraced a pricing strategy that delivered significant value to investors." Gilead (GILD) is up nearly 41% YTD. 

 

Kevin Plank, Under Armour

15 years ago Under Armour (UA) was just a company with one man shilling one shirt. Today it's a genuine threat to sports apparel companies like Nike (NKE), Adidas (ADS) and Reebok. The stock saw an 88% gain last year and another 62.5% gain YTD in 2014. Plank has led his company through 18-straight quarters of over-20% growth. That's partially why Under Armour is Yahoo Finance's company of the year.