Price water cooper House Overview

PwC (officially PricewaterhouseCoopers) is a global professional services firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's second-largest professional services firm (after Deloitte) and one of the "Big Four" accountancy firms. It has offices in 757 cities across 154 countries and employs over 161,000 people.It had total revenues of $26.6 billion in 2010, of which $13 billion was generated by its Assurance practice, $7 billion by its Tax practice and $6 billion by its Advisory practice. The firm was formed in 1998 by a merger between Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand.The trading name was shortened to PwC in September 2010 as part of a major rebranding exercise.As of 2010 it was the seventh-largest privately-owned organisation in the United States.

History
The firm was created by the merger of two large firms, Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998. These two firms each have histories dating back to the nineteenth century.

Price Waterhouse
Samuel Lowell Price, an accountant, started his practice in London in 1849. In 1865 Price went into partnership with William Hopkins Holyland and Edwin Waterhouse. Holyland left shortly after to work alone in accountancy and the firm was known from 1874 as Price, Waterhouse & C. The original partnership agreement, signed by Price, Holyland and Waterhouse could be found in Southwark Towers, one of PwC's important legacy offices in London.

Coopers & Lybrand

In 1854 William Cooper established his own practice in London, which became Cooper Brothers seven years later when his three brothers joined. In the USA in 1898, Robert H. Montgomery, William M. Lybrand, Adam A. Ross Jr. and his brother T. Edward Ross formed Lybrand, Ross Brothers and Montgomery. Coopers & Lybrand is the result of a merger in 1957 between Cooper Brothers & Co; Lybrand, Ross Bros & Montgomery and a Canadian firm McDonald, Currie and Co. In 1990 in certain countries including the UK Coopers & Lybrand merged with Deloitte Haskins & Sells to become Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte, in 1992 renamed Coopers & Lybrand. In 1998, Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand to form PricewaterhouseCoopers (written with a lowercase 'w') in an attempt to gain a scale that would put the new firm in a different league.

Global structure
The legal structure of a limited liability partnership (LLP) is very different from that of a Corporation, and as such the global firm is in fact a collection of member firms, that are run autonomously in their respective jurisdictions. The senior partners of member firms sit on a global board of partners and

there is also an 'umbrella' company called PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, a UK based company which provides co-ordination. Dennis Nally, the former Chairman of the US firm, became Chairman of PwC International on July 1, 2009.

ServicesGlobal
PricewaterhouseCoopers has three main service lines: Assurance Services Tax Advisory, (international tax planning and compliance with local tax laws, human resource consulting, and transfer pricing) Advisory - mainly consulting activities which covers Strategy, Performance Improvement, Transactions Services, Business Recovery Services, Corporate Finance, Business Valuation, Sustainability and Crisis Management in a range of specialist areas such as accountancy and actuarial advisory. PwC's service lines face the market in each country by broad industry specialisations such as:
   

Consumer and Industrial Products and Service (CIPS), Financial Services (FS), Technology, Information, Communications and Entertainment(TICE), Infrastructure, Government and Utilities (IG&U)

These sub-divisions may vary slightly in some territories. Consulting activities PwC has developed several broader consulting initiatives in the Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework, including a global effort to assist corporations with outsourcing, as well as a global political risk assessment with the political risk advisory firm Eurasia Group. Advisory services offered by PwC also include two actuarial consultancy departments; Actuarial and Insurance Management Solutions (AIMS) and a sub branch of "Human Resource Services" (HRS). Actuarial covers mainly 4 areas: pensions, life insurance, non-life insurance and investments. AIMS deals with life and non-life insurance and investments while HRS deals mainly with pensions. PwC serves the U.S. Federal Government through their Public Sector practice. PwC has over 2000 professionals based in the Washington Metro Corridor.

Major clients
Europe and North America account for about 81% of PwC's annual revenue,with Europe alone accounting for 45%.The firm's dominant practice, auditing, accounts for over 50% of PwC's revenue. One client, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, gives PwC the unique distinction of having been (in various incarnations) the tabulator and certifier of votes for the Academy Awards since 1934. PwC audits 40 per cent of companies in the FTSE 100 Index and 45 per cent of the Fortune 1000 energy companies.

Reference: www.wikipedia.org