Joint Venture Consulting and Advisory

Silent But (Potentially) Deadly: The Power of the Status Quo in Joint Ventures

JOINT VENTURE PARTNERSHIPS have a significant say in the structure, actions, and strategy of a venture. Management also has a voice in the direction of the joint venture. But what partners and management often fail to understand is there is another, silent party at the table influencing the outcome of key ...

Making Alignment Real in Joint Ventures: Board Concurrence, Minutes, and the Post-Meeting Memo

IT MAY BE AS DRY AS unbuttered toast but chew on this: Experienced JV CEOs use a variety of seemingly mundane pre-, post-, and within-Board meeting techniques to drive real, rather than perceived, alignment across their ventures. Our research has consistently shown that misalignment – whether among the owners, ...

Shareholder Stewardship of Joint Venture Employees: Opening the Aperture

TENS OF MILLIONS of people are employed in joint venture companies around the world. In many cases, these ventures are partly-owned by large national and international companies. Today, Siemens, IBM, Royal Dutch Shell, General Motors, Airbus, and Nestle each have ownership interests in joint venture companies ...

Operator Authorities: Deceptively Clear or Clearly Deceptive?

IN 2014, ONE OF Western Australia’s most successful natural resources partnerships started unraveling. Santos, the non-Operator partner of the multi-billion-dollar Spar gas joint venture, took Apache, the other partner, and Operator, to court. Santos claimed that Apache had breached the joint venture agreement ...

An Inside Look at Joint Ventures and Other Deals in U.S. Healthcare

WATER STREET PARTNERS periodically convenes joint venture dealmakers from an array of industries and geographies to speak to the latest JV trends, challenges, and best practices from their vantage points. Most recently, we spoke with Scott Musch, the Vice President of Corporate Development at Cambia Health ...

Joint Venture Portfolio Governance: Highlights from the London Roundtable

WATER STREET PARTNERS recently hosted its tenth annual Roundtable on JV Portfolio Governance for natural resource companies. Twenty industry executives, representing the oil and gas, mining, and chemicals sectors and collectively accountable for governing more than 700 non-operated ventures, gathered in ...

Joint Venture Dealmaker Outlook: Trends in Oil and Gas

WATER STREET PARTNERS periodically convenes joint venture dealmakers from an array of industries and geographies to speak to the latest JV trends, challenges, and best practices from their vantage points. Most recently, Mike Henson, Manager of Infrastructure Development at Chevron, shared his perspectives on ...

Who's My Boss Secondee Reporting and Loyalty

SECONDEES PLAY a key role in many joint ventures: some 80% of joint ventures have secondees in top management roles (e.g., COO, CFO) and 55% have a seconded CEO ( Exhibit 1). Parent companies use secondees for various reasons – for instance, to provide critical skills and capabilities, to accelerate initial ...

Joint Venture Director Selection: Shouldn’t the Board Have a Say?

VIRTUALLY ALL joint venture legal agreements provide owner companies with the unilateral right to nominate anyone they deem fit to serve as their representatives on the JV Board or equivalent body. In practice, owner companies often make these choices based on internal needs and dynamics, and often in a rush – ...

Water Street Partners advises clients on transactions and governance. Our transaction work specializes in joint ventures and other non-M&A partnerships, both in new deal formation and restructuring. On governance, we advise clients on corporate and joint venture governance, working with corporate and joint venture boards, management teams, and individual shareholders. We support clients around the world and across industries.

Slideware of the Month:
Emerging trends and findings from our new JV employee engagement survey.