About

San Miguel Brewery (SMB)’s first legal head following SMC’s restructure, Rosabel Teston-Balan sees herself as carrying out a dual role. ‘As general counsel of an operating business unit, I take pride that I am now a business manager who happens to be a lawyer’. Building a legal team somewhere where there had not been one for 20 years, meant among other things, she had to show the business they needed one. ‘I had to prove our worth and value-added to the business. We had to demonstrate that we could provide both legal and business savvy advice, that we are not business “blockers” but business “partners”. I would like to believe that I have succeeded in doing that’. During her time in the position Teston-Balan has made significant efforts to heighten efficiency and decrease cost in the legal team. These have included focusing on core expertise and outsourcing others, developing in-house IP capabilities and template documents, and making use of IT resources. She also set up a compliance management system and implemented an award-winning initiative to raise corporate governance awareness in the company. She has focused on training lawyers and improving communication between legal and the rest of the business. As a culmination of these measures, Teston-Balan believes she has ‘transformed the legal department from one-stop-shop law firm to business partners and counsellors’. Manufacturer and distributor of San Miguel beer products, SMB is SMC’s biggest core business, with two publicly listed companies in Hong Kong and Indonesia and breweries and bottling plants across the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. It also exports beer products to North America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Teston-Balan has had a long career at SMC, with past positions including corporate and regionalisation head, where she led a specialist M&A team. Her major transactional highlights have included the acquisitions and subsequent divestments of National Foods Company and Berri in Australia, Thai Amarit Brewery’s 2003 acquisition, Purefoods Corporation’s acquisition and 2009’s initial public offering of SMB itself.