The tricky job of managing people before, during and after an acquisition gets even trickier when a state-owned company is involved.
“Send lots and lots of people, very, very quickly,” David Davies, CFO of €19 billion Austrian oil firm OMV, recalls was the advice he was given as he wrapped up a meeting in Bucharest with some Big Four audit partners. It was summer 2004 and OMV was about six months away from completing the €1.5 billion purchase of a 51% stake in Petrom, Romania’s largest company. Davies was curious to know whether the auditors had any thoughts about the best way for a company such as OMV to manage the acquisition of a state-owned asset.
After all, he says, “we were taking on a monster,” and he reckoned OMV might need all the advice it could get. With some 70,000 Petrom staff—nearly ten times more than OMV—scattered across “120 companies, in 120 locations, with 120 cultures,” Davies could see all too well that the sprawling, state-owned behemoth was a force to be reckoned with. It didn’t take him long to realise just how sage the auditors’ advice would turn out to be.
Well before the deal was closed that December, Davies had been drawing up post-acquisition plans which included more than 100 projects for his own finance and IT teams, most to be completed by 2008, all of which involved the secondment of countless OMV staffers from Vienna to Bucharest, as well as the deployment of legions of external consultants. “Let’s just say we’ve been a major benefactor of the east European consulting industry,” says Davies with a chuckle.
See full Article.
Posts
