What exactly is corp dev?
Is it FP&A or is it more strategy or a combination. Do places like FB, Google have corp dev or is it called some other name? Are startups more associated with corp dev? Thanks
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Yes
>google dot com
>”corp dev”
>enter
>“Corporate Development serves as an internal team of company employees focused on finding ways to grow and add value to a company and is responsible for carrying out transactions such as mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, divestitures, strategic partnerships and more.“
thanks for the insightful response, clearly the WSO comments are better, more helpful and nuanced than what google provides ...
You’re not asking for nuance, you’re asking what corporate development is. When you start out with “is it FP&A?” it’s clear you didn’t even try to learn anything on your own. That’s why the first two responses you got were jokes - if you clearly aren’t that interested, why should anyone take the time to answer you?
Simplest way I can think to explain it is a corporations in-house M&A team
Sounds interesting but if you end up hiring bankers anyways what's the point? Isn't this another cost that is already duplicated ?
Outside bankers often are purely used for transaction advisory (similar to how you will retain lawyers during a transaction but have in house legal support as well).
An in house corp-dev team over a long time horizon has more visibility and ownership in the goals and vision of the organization. It blurs in to strategic finance, but there is also a strategic thinking element to it where they can evaluate distant M&A opportunities, etc.
Its like an internal IB department for a company.
IB analysts/associates and corp dev analysts/senior analysts have practically nothing in common when it comes to work product.
This might be a weird opinion but I feel as if work product is pretty inconsequential, you just adapt. I prefer the corp dev mindset as I believe it gives you more flexibility to prove your abilities and grow in to a bigger role versus IB where you ultimately just have to navigate through an endless river of work that is mostly bullshit. However, if you just carry the IB mindset in to corp dev you probably won't make it past a few promotions, it requires more navigation of politics and pushing yourself to stand out.
Worth noting asides from the strategic focus, a typical Corp dev person will have more involvement with operations, contracts, technical side of the business and tax - things IB is much less involved in. Also, large corporate can have a wide range build investments including some purely ventures, where bankers aren't involved. So in CD you likely will not have the depth in financing aspect of deals like in IBD, but will have more information about everything else.... Still you will both be excel and power point monkeys, of a different chimp variety!
It depends. Broadly speaking, it can be just deal work, it can be just strategy work, or it can be deal work and corporate strategy work. It depends on the firm.
Larger companies are more likely to have corp dev teams be just deal work. If the company has internal strategy groups as well than the corp dev team will more likely be just deal work.
For example, at Dominion Energy it is just deal work. At Spirit AeroSystems it is both deal work and strategy work.
Corp Dev is the department that usually guides long term strategy of a company as well as lead the M&A process for that company. Some places call it business investment teams but usually it's called Corp Dev. They have teams at Google, FB, TSLA, and then older brands like Nike, Abercrombie & Fitch, BP (oil company), and others. No company is stagnant and not looking to grow, they are all looking to acquire or find strategies that will grow revenues. Some companies are much more heavily focused on M&A than others, but that's not all Corp Dev does. As much work as bankers put into a model or CIM, it's the internal Corp Dev team that puts in realistic assumptions and pick apart a CIM to make sure the deal is worth doing for the acquiring companies when they're not being sold to PE firms.
po_6 this is an example of a great response - please fix next time, let me know if you have any questions thx..
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