Big Egos Rising.(Business)(chief executive officers as celebrities )

Byline: Joseph Contreras

Emerging-market CEOs used to play it quiet. Now some are embracing capitalist celebrity, flaunting their winnings in the public eye.

Most CEOS favor pinstripes and French cuffs. Not Yevgeny Chichvarkin. Last year, when the brash Muscovite cell-phone magnate gave a keynote address at a London conference on the Russian economy, he wore ripped jeans and a red leather biker jacket. Marketing campaigns for his Evroset chain of cell-phone and electronics stores leave little to the imagination -- "When our competitors see our prices, they'll know they're screwed." But behind his swagger and expensive sports cars is a dead-serious businessman. Evroset, now the third largest retailer in Russia, had $4.62 billion in sales last year at 5,200 branches in a dozen countries. And unlike oligarchs who made their money slicing and dicing companies once owned by the Soviet state, Chichvarkin did it on his own -- and he isn't modest about his achievements. "This country has never seen a company like ours," he boasts. "I have 37,000 employees, and I don't want to run them the way Russian companies used to manage people. I have a simple logic -- make money and teach the person next to you how to make money."

Chichvarkin belongs to a select but growing club of megamoguls from emerging-market economies whose triumphs in the business world have won them a newfound celebrity status. Unlike their predecessors, who often kept a low profile for safety, or to avoid suspicion that their gains may have been ill gotten, the new celebrity CEOs aren't afraid to flaunt what they've got, or leverage their own PR for further gain, a la Donald Trump or Britain's Richard Branson. Consider Indian liquor titan Vijay Mallya, a billionaire who isn't bashful about the 25 houses, three private jets and two helicopters he owns, or the gold chains he displays by wearing his sports shirts unbuttoned to the middle of his 51-year-old chest. There are also plenty of others working their fame for more serious aims, including a number of emerging-nation Michael Bloombergs, like Mauricio Macri, the son of the founder of Argentina's SOCMA conglomerate, who parlayed his presidency of the hugely popular Boca Juniors football club into a successful bid to be the mayor of Buenos Aires.

These rich and increasingly famous business leaders embody a number of seismic changes in their countries -- the death of centrally planned economies, the rise of capitalism, the shift toward Western-style entrepreneurialism and (to some extent, anyway) meritocracy. Reflecting the changes in the politics of their native lands, some of the Younger Turks display a Trump-esque disdain for the so-called losers of the globalization era. ''It's shameful to be poor," argues Chichvarkin. ''If you are poor, you are stupid."

But while the new moguls may scorn the poor, they actively court the middle-class consumer. When Ricardo Salinas Pliego became CEO of his family's Elektra appliance-store chain in 1987, the business was on the verge of bankruptcy. Salinas Pliego, who cultivates an image of studied cool, with French designer eyewear and a football star's perennial two-day stubble, took the company from 59 outlets to 1,700 today, in seven countries. This was thanks in good measure to the success of Banco Azteca, which Salinas Pliego (now Mexico's third richest man; his countryman Carlos Slim recently passed Bill Gates to become No. 1) opened five years ago to give Mexico's working and lower-middle classes easier access to consumer credit. A growing middle class has also enriched Mallya (a.k.a. the ''king of good times"), who is a fixture on the Bangalore socialite circuit and is often seen squiring one of the models who adorn his Kingfisher-beer swimsuit calendars. His gossip-column exposure is a calculated move in a country where millions can now aspire, if not to join Mallya's party, at least to buy one of his ...