The recognition will come as some consolation after news that his personal earnings in 2010 were down to €4.4 million from the previous year's €7.2 million. Admittedly, 2009 was a banner year for the company now known as ABInBev, following the takeover of Anheuser-Busch in 2008, which made the new company the biggest brewer of beer in the world.

Luckily, Barron's doesn't only look at earnings. It takes into account reputation for management, gathered from interviews with analysts and business colleagues. The magazine described Brito's style as "a no-frills, high- performance corporate culture that's become a textbook example of smart management". Briton is a CEO known for scrapping executive parking spaces, whose staff meetings sometimes last five minutes and who sits at a common table in an open office.

Brito was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960 and studied mechanical engineering before earning an MBA at Stanford University in California. He worked for Shell and Daimler before taking a job with Brahma, a Brazilian brewer, in 1989. His experience there - Brahma merged with Companhia Antarctica Paulista to become AmBev in 1999 - would be repeated a decade later in Belgium: AmBev merged with Leuven-based Interbrew, forming InBev. Then InBev took over Anheuser.

The rest is history: the AB takeover was an audacious move akin to a mouse swallowing a cat whole, and that at a time when the impending credit crisis was forcing companies worldwide to tighten their belts.

Barron's gave special attention this year to companies' approach to Asian markets, which just happens to be where Brito is turning next. Belgians are drinking less beer, and brewers are looking elsewhere for growth markets. Where better than a market of one billion people, where InBev already has a strong presence in Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, with a GDP growth of 12 to 13%.