Joint Venture Consulting and Advisory

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 – ...

Making JV Governance Sing: How to Use a Shareholders' Committee

ONE OF THE ENDURING tenets of good joint venture governance is the central importance of getting true decision makers from each shareholder in the same room, talking directly to each other. In many JVs, however, the actual decision makers are too senior, too busy, or otherwise unwilling to serve on the JV ...

Alternative Energy: Forces and Consequences

ONE OF THESE DAYS we are not going to need fossil fuels.” Not a routine utterance by an environmental analyst concerned about climate change, but the stunning public admission by Ali al-Naimi that alternative forms of energy are finally going mainstream. Why does Ali al-Naimi’s prognosis of the future matter? ...

Joint Venture Board Attendance: Two’s Company, Thirty’s a Crowd

JV BOARD¹ MEETINGS are the beating heart of joint venture governance. A mélange of disparate JV owner and, management wants and needs are cast into a quarterly session that shapes the future direction of the business. Structured well, a board meeting promotes candor among Directors, enables discussions on ...

Small Joint Venture Portfolios, Big Consequences

HUNDREDS OF companies across scores of countries have formed three or more new joint ventures in the last decade (Exhibit 1). The JV portfolios of some of these companies like ExxonMobil, DowDupont, and Vodafone – are enormous, representing a material portion of the company’s assets, revenue, or income. But ...

When a JV Must Do an (Uneven) Deal with its Parent Companies

BECAUSE MANY JVs are closely related to – or even directly connected with – parent company businesses, opportunities often emerge for the JV to create value by working with the parents in new and uneven ways. This might mean developing new products, functionality, or technologies favored by one parent. It ...

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.