Andersen and PricewaterhouseCoopers: a contested merger

The news was a real surprise on Friday morning (September 28th) for PricewaterhouseCoopers teams (PwC) of the French Riviera (around one hundred people between Sophia Antipolis and Nice) as in the rest of France: the consulting pole of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) joins Andersen (the former Arthur Andersen, which, since January 1st 2001, was separated from Andersen Consulting become Accenture). This merger makes the French entity of Andersen, headed by Aldo Cardoso, the number one in consulting in France.

PwC is already used to changes. In 1998, the world merger between Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand set it as the world leader in audit and consulting. Is this new merger going to change Pwc’s teams of the French Riviera ? On the ground, the feeling was that the merger concerned more particularly large counts whilst Nice and Sophia Antipolis already worked on the field of SMEs. As far as Andersen is concerned, around sixty people specialised in information technologies, they were expecting the modalities of the agreement signed on Thursday September 27th between the two big consulting and audit companies in order to know further about the local consequences of the merger.

All the more as the situation doesn’t seem as clear as what was said in the press release sent by Andersen on Thursday September 27th. In Friday morning, PricewaterhouseCoopers indicated that only a minority of associates and collaborators of its consulting pole had joined Andersen. PwC also said that the company did not agree with the operation, as minority associates had joined the competitor “in spite of rules”.

And the press release underlined that it wasn’t a merger of the management consulting activity or other PwC activities with another company, but a small group of associates leaving for the competitor”. The evolutions of the situation at the national scale and then eventually on the ground to be continued…