Jon Whiteman is a Partner at CIL and leads its industrial products and services practice. Jon’s work has been heavily international, providing support for US and European private equity firms as well as multinational corporations. He brings a wealth of operational experience from his time in industry. He started his career in the packaging industry with Fortune 500 company, Crown Holdings Inc. and also worked in sales and business insight with Diageo. Jon has an MEng in Mechanical Engineering from Manchester University (UMIST).
Greg Gille hears from three independent commercial due diligence (CDD) practitioners on how they are adapting to a deals drought, and how their offering is shifting as private equity houses contemplate post-Covid-19 scenarios,Advisory ,coronavirus
In mid-March, everything changed overnight. Between January and March in the UK, deal activity was at very high levels following another period of uncertainty linked to the general election. Now, the market is at 20% of the previous deal activity, and we are expecting suppressed volumes for some time. If it was early-stage vendor due diligence (VDD), we did progress on doing the market analysis work – these deals take time in any case, and the thinking was that if this was all sorted by July, then deals would just resume. Everybody is now conscious that timings will most likely slip further.