Report - Chemical Week Senior Financial Officers Conference, New York, August 7
I attended the 12th annual ChemWeek SFO conference in New York yesterday along with my colleague Brian Willson and several members of our NY/NJ team who had customers in attendance. The overwhelming theme of the presentations was the recent flurry of M&A activity in the industry, and whether it would be dampened by the recent tightening in credit markets. I think the consensus of the speakers, who included analysts from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and executives from both corporate and private equity firms, was that the market for M&A would slow down for a few months but is likely to continue for several years, riding the overall forecasted strength in the chemicals industry. One interesting point made by an executive from CIBA was that a key to a successful merger or divestiture was a transition plan addressing the details of change management, and that the IT and systems transition plan could be used as a starting point to then build out functional change management plans for the people. Interesting perspective that indicates how deeply IT is ingrained into the actual business processes and value streams of the company, and represents perhaps the only place where these processes have been documented in detail.
I can only hope that the attendees who sayed overnight were not too badly affected by the flooding in NYC Wednesday morning. Fortunately I did not need to make the commute into the city today - it was a scary storm this morning.
- Marc from the Chemicals Team