Change font size:   

 
Bank deleveraging has barely started

Bank deleveraging has barely started

Banks lending money to governments to help fund bank bailouts looks horribly circular

No. 6: If you don’t give it to me you’ll only lend it to someone else and look where that got us

No. 6: If you don’t give it to me you’ll only lend it to someone else and look where that got us

10 reasons to tell your boss you deserve a bonus

weeklyFiXLiquid real estate
Skip Navigation LinksHome :: Back Issues :: Philip Wright

June 2001

Philip Wright


Global head of corporate finance and recovery, PriceWaterhouse Coopers




       
Philip Wright
Philip Wright, like many others who have appeared in this column, is an affable, ebullient, and enthusiastic character. He also has a highly impressive list of M&A and privatization deals to his credit. The difference is that he is an accountant rather than an investment banker. Despite offers, he does not appear to be about to cross the fence.
"Everybody who studied accountancy would have thought about investment banking at one stage," admits Wright. "Accountancy is often seen as a first step but, strangely perhaps, I've always enjoyed it - it's like industrial psychology. I've also become used to the idea of being an independent adviser. We don't have capital market activities and we're independent of sources of finance and institutional investors that we pump deals to."
Wright recalls that his firm's push into corporate finance, "started off by accident, when we got into M&A through the MBO phenomenon in the mid 1980s. But it has become a strategy". Now, he predicts: "firms like ours will move more and more into the middle-market space [loosely $500 million to $1 billion deals] below the bulge-bracket banks."
A doctor's son, Wright was born in 1953 in Liverpool and grew up in Kent. His grandfather had come over from Australia to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh and then embarked on a mapping expedition to the Northwest Frontier Province of India before returning to Sydney to open Australia's first school of pathology. He later came back to the UK and died in Liverpool in 1939. "I never met him but I've always been fascinated by him," says Wright.
At King's School Canterbury, Wright was a good all-round sportsman and has vivid memories of playing cricket for the 1st XI as the number-three batsman and watching the tiny 14-year-old figure of David Gower - the flamboyant left-hander who went on to captain England - stroll nonchalantly to the wicket and then flay the bowling all round the ground. Returning the next year for the old boys' match, Wright dropped a catch from Gower on nought at 11.35am. By the time he caught him in the afternoon, Gower had scored 147.
Wright won a scholarship to read history at Christ Church, Oxford, where he continued to play cricket and rugby. Shortly before coming down, he sat the civil service exams but, deciding that wouldn't be "exciting enough", opted for accountancy. "I probably always had more of a financial bent," he says.
He joined Price Waterhouse in 1975 and two years later his instincts about the potential for incident in his chosen profession were vindicated during a three-month posting to Iran. There, he recalls, he got a "flavour of the way things could really go wrong". His firm was advising the Shah on how to build a forestry industry from scratch, but out of a budget of $1 billion, $900 million was spent and just 5% of the project was completed - the remainder leaking out through corruption and inefficiency.
Returning to the London office, Wright became involved in a series of highly eventful audits. He worked on the stricken United Dominion Trust until its eventual takeover by TSB in the early 1980s. He then worked as an auditor for the redoubtable Australian corporate raider John Elliott, whose Elders IXL group - nicknamed the wild bunch in the press - made an audacious bid for Allied Lyons in 1983, and then took over Carlton&United Breweries, the largest takeover in Australian history. Shortly after that, Wright was working on an audit of the Mirror Group at the time of its takeover by Robert Maxwell - when Maxwell famously called a board meeting at 4am, hoping to catch the directors at their most vulnerable, and told the finance director: "That's my chair."
In 1985, Wright became a founder member of Price Waterhouse's privatization practice and he was soon number two on the team advising the Thatcher government on the sale of the National Bus Company, the first time a lead advisory mandate had been given to a non-investment bank. The sale was a striking success. "We were very proud of the way we did it," remembers Wright. "Most investment banks were saying you should sell it as one, but we sold it in 70 separate bits which everyone said was impossible, and raised proceeds of £300 million against the £70 million predicted by the investment banks." Price Waterhouse's strategy was based on its conclusion that there were no economies of scale for bus companies running more than 300 buses.
Wright worked on the commercialization of government departments, and in 1988 became involved in the carve-up of the massive Property Services Agency - the department that owned and managed all public buildings. It was the first time a UK government department had been privatized. "It was all about separating and forming new businesses," he recalls, "so in a sense it was more consulting than investment banking."
Wright flew to Hungary 40 times in 18 months in his role as adviser to Tungsram, the first privatization in eastern Europe. He and other advisers had been asked in by the communist government and he was in Hungary when the Berlin wall came down.
In 1990, Wright, whose wife is German (they have three children) went to Berlin to start a privatization, M&A and business recovery practice for Price Waterhouse. There, his clients included Treuhandanstalt, the German privatization agency, for which he carried out more than 400 sales mandates, including the 14 German electricity distributors, Deutsche Handelsbank and Harz-Kalk, the largest limestone producer in Europe. He also advised Vivendi, Krone and Deutsche Telekom.
Between 1994 and 1998, Wright was a central member of Price Waterhouse's shareholder value team, advising a host of international blue-chip firms. He co-authored the book In Search of Shareholder Value (1998).
When Price Waterhouse and Coopers&Lybrand merged in July 1998, Wright became European leader of corporate finance and recovery. Over the next two years revenues in this business, which employs 3,000 staff and 250 partners, grew from $420 million to $600 million. He moved to his present position last October, since when revenues have grown to $1.5 billion.
  Page 1 of 2  Next | Single Page






The Fitch approach is good. They are now a serious player, and best for covered bonds

So says a German Pfandbrief specialist. Well, as Fitch is maintaining triple-A ratings, while Moody’s makes severe downgrades, he would say that wouldn’t he?

  1. US treasury market reaches breaking point

  2. Top 10 financial definitions that are funnier since the credit crunch

  3. Top 10 reasons to tell your boss you deserve a bonus this year

  4. Nomura’s great leap forward: Will Lehman takeover help fulfil its global ambitions?

  5. Eksportfinans turns to government for funding

Latest Issue

December 2008
Ruromoney Jobs Post a job

Home | Mobile site | Contact Us | Debt markets | Equities | Foreign exchange | Banking | Alternative Investments | Regions and Emerging markets | Polls & Awards | Structured credit | Back issues | Euromoney store | Useful links and Related events | Site Map

The material on this site is for financial institutions, professional investors and their professional advisers. It is for information only. Please read our Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy before using the site.

All material subject to strictly enforced copyright laws. © 2008 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC.