Corporate Development encompasses the various facets of the corporate portfolio, growth, and strategy.

Successful companies regularly revisit their corporate and portfolio strategy to understand the drivers of advantage and identify attractive avenues for future growth. A mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) strategy that is well thought out can be a source of competitive advantage and is an important part of any company’s long-term value-creation plan. As more and more companies take a systematic look at their corporate portfolios, divestitures—the selling off of pieces of the portfolio—are quickly rising to the top of the corporate agenda. Especially when a company pursues opportunities for growth in uncertain situations, joint ventures and alliances become an increasingly important—and complex—part of corporate strategy.

M&A strategies involve regularly identifying attractive growth avenues through a carefully developed long-term value-creation plan and management of the end-to-end transaction process, from target screening to final integration.

Divestitures entail taking a systematic look at the corporate portfolio to determine which businesses no longer fit the strategic agenda of the company and subsequently pursuing the best approach for selling them.

Alliances and joint ventures include defining the strategic rationale of a partnership, identifying its appropriate organizational and governance structures, and managing it stringently to achieve the desired goals.