Samuel Price, an accountant, founded the firm in London in 1850. A few years later, he took on Edwin Waterhouse as a partner of the firm, leading to the birth of Price Waterhouse. By the late 1800s, Price Waterhouse had gained significant recognition as an accounting firm.

Price Waterhouse's offices in the United States were open in the 1890s. The firm benefitted from tough auditing requirements that arose from the Great Depression.

Coopers & Lybrand, the product of a 1957 merger between Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery and the Cooper Brothers. Coopers & Lybrand was essentially an auditing firm. In the 1970s, Coopers & Lybrand studied ways to incorporate technology into automating the auditing process. Coopers & Lybrand lost a majority of its market share in the 1980s when mergers reduced the Big Eight to the Big Six.

In 1998, Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand merged to form PricewaterhouseCoopers (project "Phoenix"). The following year, merger discussions between PwC and Grant Thornton failed.

The 2002 indictment of Enron and WorldCom and the subsequent collapse of Arthur Andersen resulted in stringent SEC rules on auditor independence. One such result was the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which required auditor independence and separation of internal audit from general consulting. This forced many of the Big Four to divest their interests in management and technology consulting. PricewaterhouseCoopers had already decided to sell its consulting practice to IBM by this point.

Consulting Activities

Though the firm's core business is accountancy, it also ran a huge professional consulting branch, as did other major accountancy firms.

The Management Consulting Services (MCS) was one of fastest growing and most profitable areas of the consultancy. During the time of the dotcom era, many smaller consultancies capitalized on the tremendous wealth generated in the equity markets. PwC planned to capitalize on these developments through either a sale to possible suitors like HP and Microsoft or to spin off the division as a separate company.

The firm announced in May 2002 that its consulting activities would be spun off as an independent entity. An outside consultancy, Wolf Olins, was hired to create a brand image for the new entity, which was introduced to the public as "Monday". According to a June 2002 BBC news article, the firm's CEO, Greg Brenneman described the unusual name as "a real word, concise, recognisable, global and the right fit for a company that works hard to deliver results."

This unusual branding effort occurred in part as a response to one of the firm's rivals. During 2000, rival firm Arthur Andersen had spun off its consulting activities as Accenture.

These plans were soon revised, however. In October 2002 PricewaterhouseCoopers sold PwC Consulting, its professional consulting arm, to IBM for approximately $3.5 billion in cash and stock. In August 2003, IBM revealed that the actual value of the deal was closer to $3.9 billion. The selling of this profitable arm of the firm was a result of public pressure on all the Big Four audit firms, as it is seen to be a conflict of interest for an audit firm to be offering non-audit services to clients.

From 2002 on, but especially in Europe during summer 2005, the majority of ex PwC Consulting management and many professionals leave IBM BCS.

September 2005: xPrice starts its community mission, the PwC Consulting network must survive.

History source: Wikipedia

Note: "Price Waterhouse", "Coopers & Lybrand" and "PricewaterhouseCoopers" logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.