Play Ball

Por RYAN DUBE

LIMA, Perú—El producto interno bruto de Perú se expandió 3,01% en marzo frente a un año antes, informó el miércoles el gobierno.

El Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática, INEI, informó el miércoles que el PIB se expandió 4,79% en el primer trimestre del año respecto del mismo período de 2012.

El crecimiento de la economía fue inferior a lo esperado, ya que el índice de indicadores adelantados del Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas apuntaba a una expansión de 5,5% para marzo.

El ministerio señaló que el primer trimestre de este año tuvo cuatro días hábiles menos que el mismo lapso del año pasado, debido a que 2012 fue año bisiesto y Semana Santa cayó el año pasado en abril.

El INEI indicó que la actividad del sector minorista creció 4,02% en marzo, mientras que el sector de transportes y comunicaciones se expandió 4,92%. La agricultura registró un crecimiento de 5,84% en marzo y el sector de servicios financieros se incrementó 6,33%. La entidad informó que la actividad del sector fabril se contrajo 3,64% en marzo.

El volátil sector pesquero se redujo 20,36%, mientras que el sector de minería e hidrocarburos creció 3,36% en marzo.

El INEI indicó que la economía peruana se ha expandido durante 43 meses consecutivos.

It’s been about three months since we began confronting the electronic elephant in our living room: the huge amount of time our girls spend online, captivated by games, shows and web surfing. After much brainstorming, we settled on a grade-based solution, which I wrote about last month, ultimately letting the girls’ performance in school decide how much freedom they’d have in using computers.

I can’t say that we’ve completely solved the problem. In fact, our confrontations over this have turned a peaceful home into a bit of a battleground. One child initially lost unsupervised use of her laptop in her room and has since lost use of her laptop altogether and now must queue up with the other girls for use of the main family computer.

But on the positive side, not only are we talking about a problem everyone seemed happier ignoring, we’re also pushing each other to solve it and planning some even more ambitious experiments.

Here are a few things we’ve learned—from our own experience so far and from readers—which may help others trying to get their arms around this problem.

Don’t be oblivious: Parents need to be in a position to understand how much time is being sucked away from their children. That may simply mean being home more often and in a position to monitor when the child is in front of the device. Or it may mean doing an occasional audit through the browser history or Netflix viewing log (which may alarm you as much as ours did me—we ended up canceling our subscription).

Frank Seldin, a reader in Dutchess County in New York, says he warns friends not to get their children tablets because they’ll lose control. “When the girls play videogames, it is on my wife’s and my iPad/Fire, and we know exactly what is on it and what they are playing,” he says. “All computer use is in the kitchen (where homework is done as well), and it will stay that way.”

Find individualized solutions: Every child is so different. My kids are at different levels academically, different ages, and have varying amounts of maturity around the concept of self-monitoring. You don’t have to solve this for all time. Instead, you want to stay tuned in to where your child is and what motivates him or her.

Insist on clearer communication: I’ve learned it’s first a process of educating the child about which activities constitute work and which are better defined as play. That distinction may not always be obvious to them as online chats about homework turn into silliness and become a big time waster.

As I suggested in my original column, the best way to minimize nagging is when a child learns to send very clear signals about where he or she is in the continuum of work and play. My kids now say to me, “Mom, I’m going to take a half-hour break because I’ve been working for the past two hours on homework.” That kind of communication on the child’s part makes all the difference.

Another reader, Bob Larson of Folsom, Calif., insists on honesty from his kids. “If we catch them abusing any of these privileges, they automatically are banned from all electronics for 2 to 4 weeks depending on the severity,” he says. “We have had some of our kids banned for 6 months when they told blatant lies to our faces when they were old enough to know better.”

Give kids a chance to earn autonomy: This may be the grade-oriented solution we found, or, as suggested by Brian Verhaaren, a reader in Salt Lake City, Utah, it could mean letting your children actually pay the cost for their computer devices, their game memberships, their Netflix subscription. Ultimately, you want kids to be able to police themselves.

Consider a router “kill switch”: This solution comes from an online commenter, who literally is remodeling her home to put a router kill switch in the master bedroom. You don’t have to take that drastic a measure, but there are easy ways to get devices powered down at bedtime, including parental-control settings on PCs and Macs, and simply taking the router power cable to bed with you.

Own the problem: What kind of example are you setting? How much time do you spend with your own nose to a screen at home? Mine has been excessive—I’m always finishing work or catching up on personal email or doing computer-intensive school volunteer work. Lately, as we’ve been pushing the girls to shift their own gears, they’re pushing me, asking me to read aloud or snuggle or play a game. I sometimes have to say no, but I say yes whenever possible, so grateful that they’re asking.

A few weekends ago Emily, 14, suggested to me that we have a computer-free day. I was so refreshed that the idea came from her, I hugged her. It wasn’t possible because of another daughter’s homework load, but it got us thinking about spring break, and even more time in digital detox this summer.

—Demetria Gallegos is community editor for WSJ.com. Write to her at SundayJuggle@wsj.com. You can also join the conversation at WSJ.com/Juggle.

By LESLIE KWOH

When Jim Donald took the helm at Extended Stay America a year ago, he sensed fear.

Justin Cook for The Wall Street Journal

Extended Stay’s Jim Donald says employees ‘were afraid to do things.

Growth and innovation come from daring ideas and calculated gambles, but boldness is getting harder to come by at some companies. Leslie Kwoh reports. Photo: Justin Cook for The Wall Street Journal.

Many employees at the national hotel chain, which had recently emerged from bankruptcy, were still stuck in survival mode. Worried about losing their jobs, they avoided decisions that might cost the company money, such as making property repairs or appeasing a disgruntled guest with a free night’s stay.

“They were waiting to be told what to do,” recalls the former Starbucks Corp.

chief executive. “They were afraid to do things.”

So Mr. Donald gave everyone a safety net: He created a batch of miniature “Get Out of Jail, Free” cards, and is gradually handing them out to his 9,000 employees. All they had to do, he told them, was call in the card when they took a big risk on behalf of the company—no questions asked.

Growth and innovation come from daring ideas and calculated gambles, but boldness is getting harder to come by at some companies. After years of high unemployment and scarred from rounds of company cost-cutting and layoffs, managers say their workers seem to have become allergic to risk.

Companies large and small are trying to coax staff into taking more chances in hopes that they’ll generate ideas and breakthroughs that lead to new business. Some, like Extended Stay, are giving workers permission to make mistakes while others are playing down talk of profits or proclaiming the virtues of failure.

At Extended Stay, Mr. Donald says the small lime-green cards have been trickling in since last summer, a sign that the staff’s risk-averse mentality may be dissipating.

One California hotel manager recently called to redeem her card, he says, confessing that she nabbed 20 business cards from a fishbowl in the lobby of nearby rival La Quinta in an attempt to find prospective customers.

Another manager in New Jersey cold-called a movie-production company when she heard it would be filming in the area. The film crew ended up booking $250,000 in accommodations at the hotel.

Workers may feel some whiplash as companies inadvertently bombard them with “conflicting messages” to be creative and cautious at the same time, says Ron Ashkenas, a senior partner at Schaffer Consulting, a Stamford, Conn.-based management consulting firm that advises Fortune 500 firms including Merck & Co. and General Electric Co.

A penchant for risk can get an employee flagged as a loose cannon or hard case for management. And, while companies may talk lovingly about experimentation, they’re often quick to deem someone a failure when results don’t come quickly, Mr. Ashkenas says.

Little wonder, then, that senior managers complain that “nothing happens” when they tell their employees to feel empowered and come up with new ideas, he says. The irony, he adds, is that a company where workers fail to take risks along the way often find themselves forced into a “position where it has to take a big bet, to put all chips on one shiny new object.”

Steve Krupp, CEO of consulting group Decision Strategies International, says one of his clients, a financial-services firm, dubbed its portfolio managers the “walking wounded” because they remain traumatized by losses their portfolios sustained during the economic downturn.

Many have become overly cautious about taking even ordinary risks with investments, adds Mr. Krupp, who is devising ways for the firm’s senior leaders and employees to overcome their fears and take balanced risks.

“You can’t just avoid all risk, because it will lead to entropy,” he says.

In many cases, risk-averse employees just assume that’s how the boss wants things. Mark O’Brien, North American president of ad agency DDB Worldwide, says he got a wake-up call when workers cited “profit” as the company’s top priority in a 2011 employee survey. In previous years, profit generally ranked second to creative work, and ahead of people.

He understood why workers felt that way. His division, DDB North America, had just laid off 10% of its workforce, and clients were paying less than before. He saw the work suffer, too—the division, which brought in roughly half of the company profit, only won a tiny share of industry awards given for creative work, a key driver for attracting talent.

Talking too openly about the company’s financial pressures was dampening morale and inhibiting creativity, he reasoned, so he took managers aside and told them, “You and I can talk about money, but don’t let that spill into the rest of the agency.”

Mr. O’Brien has taken risks of his own, going beyond the usual employee pools to source new talent in the U.K. and Latin America, where he says the advertising industry is more competitive.

To prod employees into action, some management gurus are preaching the virtues of failure.

Naveen Jain, CEO of information-technology company Inome, says his own missteps as an entrepreneur led him to urge his 400 employees to “fail fast” if they can, moving on quickly from projects that don’t take off.

“My whole life has been a set of failures,” says Mr. Jain, whose Internet-search venture InfoSpace almost ran out of money in the 1990s. “It’s impossible to try something new and not fail.”

Write to Leslie Kwoh at leslie.kwoh@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 20, 2013, on page B8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Memo to Staff: Take More Risks.

By RACHEL ROSENTHAL

For parents sending high-school seniors to college in the fall, here’s a surprising financial tip: Contributing to a 529 plan even just months before the first tuition payment is due will qualify the account owner for a tax benefit in many states.

Adding to a 529 can lower the state taxes you owe—under certain conditions—in 34 states and the District of Columbia, according to a tally by college-planning website FinAid.org.

Make sure your plan doesn’t require a minimum holding period before withdrawals to get the tax break. While most states don’t require such a holding period, a handful do—like Michigan. There, the deduction of up to $5,000 per year for individuals (and $10,000 for a married couple filing jointly) is determined by subtracting distributions from the total contributions to the plan within the same calendar year. This implies you need to take the distribution in a subsequent tax year to get the deduction.

Overlooked Loophole?

Joe Hurley, founder of the website savingforcollege.com, says he wouldn’t be surprised if more states add holding-period requirements because of the revenue losses states have suffered in recent years. It’s possible, he says, that most states either haven’t seen this as a big issue or that they remain unaware of it.

Investors can open any state-sponsored 529, though most states offer tax incentives only for residents who enroll in a plan in their home state. “Always start with your own state plan” when shopping for 529s, says Stuart Ritter, a vice president and certified financial planner at T. Rowe Price Group.

“But don’t stop there,” particularly if you are investing for the long term, he says. Some state plans have high fees, limited investment options or poor records that should be weighed against tax benefits, Mr. Ritter says. Morningstar.com and savingforcollege.com offer ratings for 529s based on such criteria.

Note that some states—including Pennsylvania, Arizona, Maine, Missouri and Kansas—offer a tax benefit for contributions to out-of-state plans. No break is available in states without income tax.

Aid Consideration

If a student will apply for need-based aid, consider federal aid rules before setting up a 529 as well. The rules determine what each student can afford to pay based on his or her income and assets and on the income and assets of the parents if the student is a dependent.

When a 529 is owned by a grandparent, the assets aren’t counted, but payments from the account on behalf of the student count as income for the student. In light of this, Keith Bernhardt, vice president of Fidelity Investments’ college-planning group, says it may be better for grandparents to contribute to a 529 owned by the parents. In most states, grandparents residing in the state where the plan is sponsored will get the deduction, no matter who owns the account or where he lives, says Mr. Hurley.

Another tip: If the 529 contribution will be spent in a few months, the investment option should be conservative. College-savings professionals recommend money-market and short-term-bond funds.

Ms. Rosenthal is an editor for WSJ.com. Email her at rachel.rosenthal@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared April 7, 2013, on page R1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Student Starting College This Year? A 529 Savings Plan Might Still Help..

By LIZETTE CHAPMAN

Technology entrepreneurs of past eras took two years to build a product, hire a staff and figure out whether there was any real market for their service. But today all that typically takes only a few months as founders cycle quickly through different ideas until they find one that sticks.

Kevin Systrom’s Instagram, which started out as a virtual “check-in” site and wound up as a photo-sharing service, is a recent high-profile example.

How did someone go from wanting to build his company to the sky on Thursday to selling it for $1 billion on Sunday? Still, it’s hard to say no to a billion. Andrew Dowell reports on digits. Photo: Getty Images.

The 28-year-old Mr. Systrom started a company about two years ago that attempted to put a new spin on the idea of virtually checking in at various locations via smartphones, then broadcasting that visit to one’s social network. His company, which he called Burbn Inc., enabled people to leave messages via their phones that could be retrieved by others visiting the same location.

Over the next few months the idea evolved, and soon Mr. Systrom had seized on the concept of a mobile app that would allow people to take photos, alter them visually and share them. That app was called Instagram. Earlier this month, Mr. Systrom and his co-founder sold the company to Facebook Inc. for $1 billion.

Mr. Systrom is part of a new breed of entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s who strategically “pivot”—try out new ideas, shed them quickly if they don’t catch on, and move on to the next new thing. Their companies are mostly in the mobile and Web sectors, where it’s relatively cheap and easy to tinker with software and create new products on the fly.

Words like “pivot” and the related “iterate” have been used in and around Silicon Valley for several years, generally to describe failing gracefully.

But their use has picked up significantly in recent months amid the broader public’s fascination with the entrepreneurs behind high-profile start-ups, some of whom were able to get funding from investors despite significant changes in their original business plans.

Ben Horowitz of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz used the word “pivot” three times in a nearly 800-word blog post earlier this week to discuss the firm’s investments in businesses such as Burbn.

Investors say the founders who made left turns are generally more experienced—and less fearful of failure—than past generations of tech entrepreneurs. The founders who change products and markets between one and three times raise more money than those who don’t, according to Startup Genome Compass of San Francisco, which tracks more than 13,000 Internet start-ups. In fact, they raised roughly 2½ times more capital than founders who changed products and markets either four or more times or not at all, its research says.

“You pivot as many times as you can, as fast as you can, until you run out of money,” says entrepreneur Evan Kuo, a 27-year-old University of California, Berkeley, engineering graduate. He’s currently working on a site he calls Curios.me, now in its second iteration.

Patrick Chung, a partner at New Enterprise Associates, a Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm, says that what he once might have described as “failed seed investments” he now calls “experiments.” And he’s backing more of them. Just two months ago, NEA launched the Experiment Fund at Harvard University to invest in very early stage companies in the Boston area.

Many of the new breed of young guns have made mistakes, all the while gaining the seasoning and experience that may increase their chances of succeeding with their next idea, investors say. Like Mr. Kuo, Mr. Chung says, they may fail at one start-up idea but “don’t just go away with their tail between their legs. They go on to do something else.”

It has become easier to do this thanks to the rise of social-media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and the advent of stores that distribute mobile “apps,” or applications. These advances have sharply reduced the cost of distribution, making it cheaper to get products into the marketplace fast.

“‘You pivot as many times as you can, as fast as you can,’ says one entrepreneur.”

“Pivot to me is not a four-letter word,” says Tony Conrad, a partner in the early-stage venture capital firm True Ventures. “It represents some of the best methodology that the Valley has invented. Starting something, determining it’s not working, and then leveraging aspects of [that] technology is extremely powerful.”

The start-ups in the tech incubator Y Combinator, whose acceptance rate is less than 3%, change products and markets so frequently that the idea they applied with is often irrelevant to the final product, says founder Paul Graham. That prompted Mr. Graham to launch a program targeting groups that don’t have an idea yet. It will begin this summer in Silicon Valley.

Even after what seems like a failure, an ability to quickly adapt is considered a key skill among founders. While Mr. Kuo was at the tech incubator 500 Startups, he founded the Facebook fan-site network CrowdRally, which had 40 million viewers. He says he decided to close it after Facebook lawyers contacted him. Facebook confirms its legal team flagged certain CrowdRally uses as inappropriate, but says it didn’t shut down the start-up.

Keeping the same team intact, Mr. Kuo was able to stretch the $150,000 that 500 Startups invested in CrowdRally across eight months of experimenting. He tested a handful of ideas before deciding to create a version of question-and-answer site Quora.com for college students.

He built a prototype for Curios.me in four weeks, launched it, got student feedback and then presented the working idea as a company to NEA, which promptly invested $400,000.

“Everything could be wrong or everything could be right, but you don’t know until you get it to consumers,” says 33-year-old Mike Ouye. He worked at three start-ups before he launched his first product, a mobile social-gaming app for smartphones, at Red Robot Labs, which he co-founded. The app was just 40% complete and he wasn’t happy with it, but he says he went ahead anyway because he needed feedback on his initial thesis before seeking funding.

Mr. Ouye collected player data and used the suggestions to tweak the product. About five months later he secured a $2 million seed round for his company.

By pushing ahead, Mr. Ouye says, he benefited: “I’ve learned how to apply metrics to products, iterate quickly and make decisions without overthinking it.” In September, he raised an additional $8.5 million, and he got $5 million more last month.

—Emily Maltby contributed to this article.

Write to Lizette Chapman at lizette.chapman@dowjones.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Mr. Kuo built a prototype for Curios.me in four weeks. An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the site’s name as Curious.me.

By MARC MYERS

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Strolling through a grove of lemon trees behind his home, songwriter Jeff Barry talked about his girl-group hits of the 1960s. When the conversation turned to how the work was divided between him and Ellie Greenwich—his songwriting partner at the time, who died in 2009—he offered a surprise.

“People always marvel at how closely Ellie could identify with the teenage girl’s psyche,” said Mr. Barry, who recently turned 75. “Except I wrote most of the lyrics—not Ellie. She wrote most of the music.”

Ken Fallin

Mr. Barry is responsible for the words to some of the most influential teenage love songs of the early ’60s sung from the female perspective. At the height of the “girl group” phenomenon—which ran roughly from 1961 to 1966—he co-wrote “Be My Baby,” “Baby, I Love You,” “Chapel of Love,” “Leader of the Pack,” “River Deep, Mountain High” and dozens of others. In 1964 alone, he had 17 hits on Billboard’s pop chart.

Fifty years ago this month, Mr. Barry’s first girl-group hit co-written with Greenwich and Phil Spector—the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron”—was released and went to No. 3. Its overheated word patterns and lyrics about a heart standing still and a boy named Bill captivated a generation of lovelorn girls and set the stage for a long series of angst-ridden singles. Yet Mr. Barry’s experience with music and dating was admittedly limited.

“My songwriting ability probably started with my blind father and intellectually disabled sister,” he said. “I had to be simple, clear and supersuccinct when talking to them. I had to make my father see what I was seeing and make my sister understand what I was thinking. The rest was sensitivity and poverty.”

Born Joel Adelberg in 1938, Mr. Barry spent his early years in Brooklyn. His father was an insurance salesman who, despite his disability, was adept at selling policies by phone. Life changed for Mr. Barry at age 7, when his parents divorced. “My mother wouldn’t take a dime from my father and moved me, my sister and my grandfather into her brother’s attic in Plainfield, N.J.”

Four years later, Mr. Barry’s family moved back to Brooklyn—to a cramped one-bedroom apartment. “I lived there until I was about 20. There was no money for anything, so I had to use my imagination and rely on my wits. Everything I owned was in one dresser drawer.”

There was no money to buy records, and the family didn’t have a radio or television. Mr. Barry took only one piano lesson and didn’t fare well as a phrase-turner. “In high school, we had to write a poem. Mine went: ‘I love to write poetry, / I write it all the time, / I just can’t seem to get it to rhyme somehow.’ The teacher told me to get out.”

In his spare time, Mr. Barry began writing songs for a doo-wop group he formed called the Tarrytones. “Culture? There were gangs in Brooklyn—that was our culture. They were out there somewhere, and I was constantly afraid of them.”

After graduating, Mr. Barry spent three years in the U.S. Army Reserve while studying industrial engineering at City College in Manhattan. “I liked car design and how things worked, but I also wanted to be a singer. A songwriter? What was that? A singer was the only way out of that apartment.”

Eventually, a family friend who knew Arnold Shaw, a music-publishing executive, wrangled Mr. Barry an audition in 1958. “I sang some of the weird songs I had written. Arnold thought my voice was fine, but he was really knocked out by my lyrics. He asked how much music I knew. I told him just two chords—C and G. So he teamed me with writers who knew all the chords.”

Mr. Barry dropped out of college and began recording singles for RCA. In 1959, when a song was needed for a singer named Ray Peterson, Mr. Barry pitched “Tell Laura I Love Her.” “It was originally about a guy gored by a bull who was dying. So I made it a car crash instead, and the song became a Top 10 hit in 1960.”

Married that same year, Mr. Barry was introduced to Greenwich by family members in 1961. Bonds grew, and he divorced his first wife in late 1961, marrying Greenwich in 1962. Mr. Barry and Greenwich soon joined Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s Trio Music and began churning out songs for the Crystals, the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las and other girl groups. “I never wrote lyrics down—I still don’t,” Mr. Barry said. “I sing them, and they come out in melody form.”

The lyrics for “Be My Baby” came to Mr. Barry as Mr. Spector vamped Greenwich’s melody line on the piano. “I was beating the side of a steel file cabinet while Phil played—that’s how he got the idea for the song’s big opening drum beat.”

But how did Mr. Barry come up with words that won girls’ hearts? “I’d first imagine a film of a teenage situation. For ‘Be My Baby,’ I pictured a couple walking together and entering a room of friends: ‘So won’t you say you love me? / I’ll make you so proud of me, / We’ll make ‘em turn their heads, / every place we go.’

“To write for girls, I had to become one—I had to see Tommy walking down the street. It was like putting on a coat. I had to feel their obsessions, their desires—love, marriage, socializing, excitement and status.”

The Beatles and the British Invasion didn’t slow Mr. Barry. “When we helped start Red Bird Records with Leiber and Stoller in ’64, Ellie and I wrote ‘Chapel of Love’ with Phil Spector. It went to No. 1 for three weeks that year and knocked the Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ out of the top spot. ‘Leader of the Pack’ and other hits came next.”

Mr. Barry and Greenwich divorced in 1965 but continued working together. In the years that followed, Mr. Barry co-produced singles by the Monkees and the Archies, discovered and co-produced records for Neil Diamond, and wrote the TV themes for “One Day at a Time,” “The Jeffersons” and “Family Ties.”

Are today’s teenage girls different from those 50 years ago? “Today’s girls aren’t as cynical as you’d think,” said Mr. Barry, who remarried in 1974, has four children—including two adult daughters—and is considering a Broadway jukebox musical about his life. “Find me a 15-year-old boy singing ‘I love you, baby,’ and you’ll see that girls still believe in true love. I still believe.”

Mr. Myers writes daily about music at JazzWax.com and is the author of “Why Jazz Happened” (University of California Press).

A version of this article appeared April 25, 2013, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Girl Groups’ Go-to Guy.

Por ROBB M. STEWART e ALEX MACDONALD

O novo diretor-presidente da BHP Billiton

se comprometeu a frear os investimentos ao longo dos próximos anos devido às preocupações com retornos fracos de grandes projetos em áreas como o gás de xisto, que têm atraído críticas dos acionistas.

Em entrevista ao The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Mackenzie disse que a BHP, maior mineradora do mundo em valor de mercado, vai reduzir as despesas de capital de maneira “significativa” nos próximos anos, a partir do pico de mais de US$ 22 bilhões que a empresa antecipa para o ano fiscal que se encerra em junho.

A decisão foi tomada depois que grandes acionistas, como a BlackRock Inc.

e outros, começaram a questionar os volumosos investimentos que as mineradoras continuam fazendo para ampliar sua capacidade e levar mais minério de ferro e outros minerais para o mercado, embora os preços tenham caído.

Poucos dias depois de assumir oficialmente a liderança da BHP, Mackenzie disse que seu objetivo é gerar um fluxo de caixa livre substancial a partir das operações da empresa, incluindo campos de petróleo e gás nos Estados Unidos, minas de cobre no Chile e depósitos de minério de ferro na Austrália. Ele disse que cada uma das divisões da BHP deve ser autossuficiente e gerar caixa, tendo que disputar com outras os futuros investimentos.

“Se um projeto, área geográfica ou uma commodity não oferecer retornos adequados, vamos redirecionar nosso capital para outros objetivos ou simplesmente não vamos investir. Isso obviamente vai criar a oportunidade de devolver mais capital aos acionistas, e é esse equilíbrio que eu me preocupo muito em acertar”, disse ele terça-feira na Espanha, durante um congresso de mineradoras.

Mackenzie pretende continuar os esforços iniciados no ano passado para cortar custos, mas também planeja enxugar os investimentos. Assim, os projetos e os ativos terão de competir mais intensamente para garantir uma fatia do capital reduzido. Ou seja, a empresa deve ser capaz de gerar um “retorno médio mais alto sobre volumes menores de investimentos incrementais”, disse ele.

Ele disse a investidores em Barcelona que os gastos de capital e de exploração devem cair para uns US$ 18 bilhões no próximo ano fiscal e ainda mais depois que a empresa fixar metas mais elevadas para o rendimento dos novos projetos. Apesar de investir menos, Mackenzie disse que pretende “fazer a empresa crescer mais” e que continuará aumentando a produção de commodities essenciais.

A produção de gás do campo de xisto Eagle Ford, no Texas, deve aumentar 66% nos próximos três anos, para mais de 200.000 barris diários de petróleo equivalente em 2015, disse ele.

Mackenzie vinha galgando postos no setor de matérias-primas depois que deixou a carreira acadêmica, culminando com a ascensão ao comando da BHP na sexta-feira passada, em substituição a Marius Kloppers, que liderou a empresa australiana por cinco anos e meio e vai permanecer até outubro como consultor. Mackenzie, que foi nomeado para o cargo em fevereiro, apresentou no mês passado uma estrutura de gestão simplificada que elimina uma camada de executivos e aumenta o número de gerentes subordinados diretamente a ele.

“A motivação principal é fazer com que todos trabalhem em torno do eixo da produtividade, executando nossas operações de forma mais eficiente, para aumentar as margens e os retornos mesmo na ausência de preços altos”, disse Mackenzie na entrevista.

Sua prudência está alinhada com iniciativas de outras grandes mineradoras, forçadas a conter gastos devido à queda no preço dos minérios que acompanha o enfraquecimento da demanda na China, grande consumidora de matérias-primas. A Rio Tinto

PLC se comprometeu a cortar mais de US$ 5 bilhões em custos até o fim de 2014. Já a Glencore

Xstrata PLC, grupo resultante de uma fusão recente, também prometeu reduzir gastos eliminando a duplicação de cargos e simplificando sua estrutura.

Ben Lyons, gerente de carteira da ATI Asset Management em Sydney, que possui ações da BHP, disse que a mineradora fez uma sucessão tranquila e que reuniões de investidores com o novo diretor-presidente e o antigo reforçaram o sentimento de continuidade no comando.

Mackenzie disse que a perspectiva para a demanda tem melhorado e que os temores sobre um excesso de oferta no mercado são exagerados. “Vendo as coisas daqui da Europa, que provavelmente é uma retardatária, há mais sinais de otimismo no mundo desenvolvido.” Os EUA, em particular, estão mais saudáveis, apoiados pelo aumento da produção de petróleo, que está ajudando a economia, disse ele.

A BHP já investiu dezenas de bilhões de dólares para expandir suas operações de mineração e energia nos últimos anos. Mackenzie disse que 80% dos grandes projetos ainda em curso, como a expansão da capacidade das jazidas de minério de ferro de Pilbara, na Austrália, estarão concluídos até meados de 2014.

Os investimentos futuros vão mirar quatro pilares: petróleo, cobre, minério de ferro e carvão para siderurgia. A BHP ainda está cogitando um quinto pilar e deve decidir se vai prosseguir com o projeto Jansen de potássio no Canadá, orçado em mais de US$ 10 bilhões, disse Mackenzie, acrescentando que o gás de xisto continua a ser forte candidato aos investimentos reduzidos da BHP daqui em diante.