Joint Ventures: Driving Innovation While Limiting Risk

Companies may have to innovate their capital deployment methods to stay ahead of the current huge marketplace and economic disruptions. But those capabilities cannot always be scaled in-dwelling or addressed through traditional mergers and acquisitions.

CFOs are more and more using joint ventures to grow their businesses while sharing risk and benefiting from optionality. Companies frequently use joint ventures to restrict hazard publicity when they buy new assets or enter new markets. A modern EY survey of C-suite executives showed that forty three% of businesses are thinking about joint ventures as an different form of financial commitment.

Although businesses normally flip to regular M&A to spur growth and innovation around and earlier mentioned natural solutions, M&A can be hard in the current surroundings: potentially large money outlays with a limited line-of-sight on return, inconsistent marketplace progress assumptions, or merely a greater threshold to apparent for the organization scenario.

Balancing Trade-offs

Companies may will need to weigh the trade-offs between managing disruption and risk as they take into account pursuing a joint undertaking or alliance, specifically, (i) how disruption will facilitate differentiated progress and (ii) the risk inherent in capital deployment when there is uncertainty in the marketplace. The responses to these inquiries will help inform the path forward (demonstrated in the following graphic).

  Balancing Current market Disruption with Uncertainty 

Evaluating a JV

Agree on the transaction rationale and perimeter. A lack of alignment concerning joint undertaking companions concerning strategic objectives, aims, and governance structure may impact not only deal economics but also organization efficiency. No matter if the gap is similar to the definition of relative contribution calculations or each partner’s decision rights, addressing the issues early in the deal process can help achieve deal objectives.

Get started due diligence early and with urgency. Do not undervalue the time and hard work required to prepare and exchange appropriate information with which your team is cozy. Plan for because of diligence, as very well as opportunity reverse because of diligence, to include not only financial and commercial components but also functional diligence aspects, such as human resources and information know-how.

Define the exit strategy before exiting. While partners might exit joint ventures based on the achievement of a milestone or because of to unexpected situations, the perfect exit opportunity should be predetermined prior to forming the structure. Reactive disagreements, arbitration, or litigation threats over the mechanisms of JV dissolution and asset valuation can consequence in not only economic but unnecessary reputational loss.

Launching the JV

Once both companies have navigated the challenges of diligence, the large lifting begins with standing up the entity. The CFO, critical in structuring the business’s economics, can also help ensure a successful close and realization of early-year objectives. Key areas of concentration involve:

Defining the path to price creation. In joint ventures, value creation can come from reaching earnings growth and reducing costs through combining capabilities. Setting up alignment and commitment within the business and parent companies to realize the growth plan may be critical. Corporations that fail to create value normally do so because they (i) insufficiently plan, (ii) lose focus after deal close, or (iii) establish poor governance similar to accountability and monitoring.

Developing the running model. A joint venture needs an operating model that combines the best capabilities of the partners while maintaining the agile nature of a startup. The combination can be tough to execute in a market that could have incumbent gamers with no incentive to encourage innovation or disruption. Companies often don’t invest enough time planning for 3 significant and similar components:  (i) defining how and where by the undertaking will operate, (ii) the market, and (iii) the venture’s sell capabilities. They should be synthesized into an running model and governance structure that complement each other.

Maintaining the tradition adaptable. A joint undertaking culture that adheres to historical affiliations with both or equally moms and dads can inhibit how fast the organization will achieve progress objectives, specially in customer engagement and go-to-marketplace collaboration. Responding immediately to marketplace requires and developing customer commitments require executives to rethink the optimal tradition for joint ventures versus how factors have generally been completed in the past.

Scenario Review

An EY team recently helped an industrial manufacturer and an oil and gas servicer form a joint venture that shared operational capabilities from equally parent companies to sell innovative, end-to-end answers to consumers. The joint venture was also considered to have an early-mover gain to disrupt an untapped and unsophisticated marketplace.

1 company had the domain knowledge, and both businesses had a element of a new marketplace providing. It would have taken each company more time to develop this marketplace providing by itself. Each company’s objective was to strike a stability concerning managing the risk of going it alone with pinpointing a partner with a capacity that it did not possess.

By coming jointly, the companies were equipped to enter new consumer markets, deploy new products traces, explore new R&D capabilities, and leverage a resource pool from the parent businesses. The joint venture also allowed for larger innovation, given the shared operations and complementary suite of solutions that would not have been obtainable to both parent company without substantial financial commitment or hazard.

The joint venture was equipped to function as a lean startup although leveraging two multibillion-greenback parent companies’ resources and expertise and minimizing hazard for both parent companies to carry innovative services to the marketplace.

CFOs can participate in a significant purpose in assisting their companies pursue a joint undertaking, vet joint undertaking companions, and then act as an informed stakeholder across stand-up and realization activities. With continued financial and marketplace uncertainty, it may be especially critical for CFOs to identify options like joint ventures that can help companies stay ahead of disruption, spur innovation, and manage risk.

Sonal Bhatia, is principal and Neil S. Desai a managing director at EY-Parthenon, Ernst & Youthful LLP. Particular contributors to this write-up were Ramkumar Jayaraman a senior director at EY-Parthenon, Ernst & Young LLP, and Caroline Faller, director at EY-Parthenon, Ernst & Young LLP.

The views expressed by the authors are not essentially these of Ernst & Youthful LLP or other associates of the world wide EY business.

E&Y, EY-Parthenon, Joint Ventures, JV