Natural Resources M&A

Hi guys,


How strong is a career in a Natural Resources (specifically Chemicals) M&A team? Seen a few job posting's lately (Lazard for example) and am interested if anyone has any experience/info!


Thanks

 

I am not entirely sure if I understand the question, to be honest. It's a coverage group like any other. If you're worried about being pigeonholed, don't be, particularly on the analyst level. Even more so if you're talking about Chemicals, which, on a side note, is usually covered within Industrials (not sure about Lazard though).

 

Hey man, thanks for this. I guess I meant in terms of pigeonholing myself, yeah. Don't know too much about it but seems like a cool place but worried about it being a bit more niche than Tech, Healthcare, consumer etc?

 

Don't sweat it. @brutalfinguy gave a pretty good response IMO. Yes, it's more niche than Tech or Consumer, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. At the analyst level, it won't exclude you from traditional exit opportunities and that's before even taking into account that you're presumably doing Chemicals, which isn't niche at all.

 

I know a person who was in the NatRes group of a BB, she exited to an infra PE fund. As far as I know she worked on a fair amount of renewable deals.

 
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AFAIK, Chemicals sector comes under NR in Goldman, while many other BBs bucket it under Diversified Industrials (not cognizant about Lazard though).

Now, coming to your question, its gonna be niche, but it has its own flavors. Lots of traditional people, lots of old school companies, and financing structures. You'd definitely be seeing in medium term the cross-collaboration of NR + TMT teams, as NextGen-tech (Climate tech, Solar-tech etc.) makes its way. 

Now being a niche sector has its own pros and cons. You'd make expert in the field, and it consists of many specialty fields (Chemicals, O&G-> Upstream, Midstream, Downstream, Metals & Mining, Utilities). But no. of deals will stay low in M&A as compared to say Industrials, Consumer, Healthcare or TMT. Lots of interesting organizational structures though you'd see which would help in understanding Corporate Strategy in detail.

 

Wow, thank you so much for this - super insightful! Interesting to learn about the cross-collaboration of NR + TMT in the medium term. This will be my first FT role in IB / M&A, so I'm excited to see if I gain any exposure to this.

 

Chemicals vs O&G is different. O&G nat res will pigeonhole you a bit... mostly exits to O&G or infra jobs, and if you want to do generalist PE you almost always have to go to a different IB group first. That would not be my first choice for optionality unless you really want to cover energy.

Chemicals is usually seen as part of industrials and will have more broad exit ops

 

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