Price Waterhouse

Also known as: Price, Waterhouse & Co. — the 1874–1990s styling of the partnership · Price Waterhouse LLP — the late-twentieth-century legal styling carried in the Philippine firm's own history ([PwC Philippines — Our History](https://www.pwc.com/ph/en/about-us/our_history.html "Our history — PwC Philippines (Isla Lipana & Co.)")) · PricewaterhouseCoopers — the merged successor of 1998 · PwC — the successor's trading brand since September 2010 ([Wikipedia — PwC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC "PwC — Wikipedia (Price Waterhouse history section; Price Waterhouse redirects here)"))

Business

Definition

Price Waterhouse was the London-founded accountancy firm — from 1874 styled Price, Waterhouse & Co. — that grew from a one-man practice into one of the world’s largest professional-services partnerships and, in 1998, merged with Coopers & Lybrand to form PricewaterhouseCoopers, the network trading since September 2010 as PwC. Its founding line runs from Samuel Lowell Price, who opened an accountancy practice at No. 5 Gresham Street in London in 1849; in 1865 Price took William Hopkins Holyland and Edwin Waterhouse into partnership, and from 1874 — Holyland having left to practice alone — the firm traded as Price, Waterhouse & Co. (Wikipedia — PwC) By the late nineteenth century it stood among the leading British firms; it opened its New York office in 1890, and its worldwide practice was “a federation of collaborating firms that had grown organically” rather than a merger-built empire. (Wikipedia — PwC)

The Philippine thread is the firm’s oldest in Asia’s accountancy record. The Manila practice founded in 1922 as White, Page & Co. — the lineage this wiki’s Isla Lipana & Co. entry carries — was designated Price Waterhouse’s correspondent in the Philippines in 1958, took the name Joaquin Cunanan & Co. in 1964, and became a member of Price Waterhouse International in 1973; in 1981 its chairman Corazon de la Paz-Bernardo became “Price Waterhouse’s first lady senior partner worldwide.” (PwC Philippines — Our History) With the 1998 merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand the network became PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the Philippine firm — after four decades under Cunanan’s name — was renamed Isla Lipana & Co. in 2005, the name under which PwC Philippines practices today. (PwC Philippines — Our History, Wikipedia — PwC)

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	N/A as a standalone title — “Price Waterhouse” redirects to the PwC article, where the firm’s history is carried (redirect verified this session) (Wikipedia — PwC)
Wikidata	Price Waterhouse (Q10638703) — “accounting firm” (verified this session) (Wikidata — Q10638703)
DBpedia	N/A — dbpedia.org unreachable this session (ETIMEDOUT)
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A — id.loc.gov returned HTTP 403 this session
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	Price Waterhouse Price Waterhouse & Co. Samuel Lowell Price Edwin Waterhouse 1849 1874 1890 New York federation Big Eight 1998 merger Coopers Lybrand PricewaterhouseCoopers Philippines Joaquin Cunanan correspondent 1958 Price Waterhouse International 1973 Isla Lipana Sarbanes-Oxley consulting IBM Monday
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

Price, Waterhouse & Co. — the 1874–1990s styling of the partnership
Price Waterhouse LLP — the late-twentieth-century legal styling carried in the Philippine firm’s own history (PwC Philippines — Our History)
PricewaterhouseCoopers — the merged successor of 1998
PwC — the successor’s trading brand since September 2010 (Wikipedia — PwC)

Examples and Analogies

A brand welded from two surnames: the firm’s name is a Victorian merger record — Price (1849) and Waterhouse (partner from 1865) surviving, Holyland (1865–1874) dropping out — so that a London doorway’s sign of 1874 became, 124 years later, half of the sixteen-letter “PricewaterhouseCoopers.” (Wikipedia — PwC)
Correspondent first, member later — the Philippine pattern: Price Waterhouse reached the islands the way it reached most of the world, by affiliation before integration: a designated correspondent in Manila from 1958, formal membership of Price Waterhouse International only in 1973 — fifteen years in which a Filipino partnership carried the brand without belonging to the firm. (PwC Philippines — Our History)
A federation, not an empire: the worldwide practice was “a federation of collaborating firms that had grown organically” — the architecture the merged network still declares when it says its member firms are separate legal entities. (Wikipedia — PwC)
Verified organizational data:
1849–1890: Price founds the practice at No. 5 Gresham Street (1849); partnership with Holyland and Waterhouse (1865); Price, Waterhouse & Co. from 1874; New York office 1890, Liverpool 1904 (Wikipedia — PwC)
1958 / 1964 / 1973: the Philippine practice is “designated as Price Waterhouse correspondent in the Philippines”; takes the name Joaquin Cunanan & Co.; “becomes a member of Price Waterhouse International” (PwC Philippines — Our History)
1981: Corazon de la Paz-Bernardo becomes chairman and senior partner — “Price Waterhouse’s first lady senior partner worldwide” (PwC Philippines — Our History)
1998: “Price Waterhouse merges globally with Coopers & Lybrand to create PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)” (PwC Philippines — Our History, Wikipedia — PwC)
2002 / 2005: PwC Consulting — branded “Monday” — is sold to IBM for roughly US$3.5 billion; the Philippine firm’s “name changes to Isla Lipana & Co.” (Wikipedia — PwC, PwC Philippines — Our History)

Usage Scenarios

1. Citing the Pre-1998 Firm in Philippine Audit History

Researchers who encounter “Price Waterhouse” in Philippine filings and annual reports of the 1958–1998 decades are reading the work of Joaquin Cunanan & Co. as correspondent and then member firm — the correct chain for attributing the global name’s Philippine engagements. (PwC Philippines — Our History)

2. Studying the Big Eight to Big Four Consolidation

Price Waterhouse is one of the two parents of the 1998 merger that cut the Big Six to the Big Five — the step that, with Arthur Andersen’s collapse in the Sarbanes-Oxley era, produced today’s Big Four, the tier this wiki’s Big Four Accounting Firms entry surveys. (Wikipedia — PwC)

3. Reading the Sarbanes-Oxley Consulting Separation

The firm’s corporate afterlife is a case study in regulatory surgery: the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act “severely limited the overlap between management consulting and auditing services,” and the merged firm answered by selling its consulting arm — filed first as a US$1-billion IPO under the Wolff Olins brand “Monday,” then sold to IBM for roughly US$3.5 billion and folded into IBM Global Business Services. (Wikipedia — PwC)

4. Researching the Firm’s Litigation Record

The firm’s name survives in American legal history: Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision on sex discrimination and mixed motives, carries the pre-merger firm’s name into every employment-law casebook. (Wikipedia — PwC)

Strategies

Expand by correspondent, institutionalize by membership: from the New York office of 1890 to the Manila correspondent of 1958, the firm internationalized through federated affiliations, converting proven local practices into members — the strategy that produced Price Waterhouse International. (Wikipedia — PwC, PwC Philippines — Our History)
Put the partners’ surnames on the door: Price, Waterhouse, Holyland — later Joaquin Cunanan, Jerry Isla, Tammy Lipana — the firm and its Philippine seat both converted personal partnership into institutional brand. (Wikipedia — PwC, PwC Philippines — Our History)
Merge at the top of the market, divest what regulation forbids: the 1998 combination was scale defense by two Big Six firms; when Sarbanes-Oxley limited audit–consulting overlap, the network sold the consulting business rather than risk the audit franchise. (Wikipedia — PwC)

Security and Safety Measures

Assurance as the public function: Price Waterhouse’s core product for a century and a half was the independent audit — the capital-market safeguard whose regulatory protection, from Sarbanes-Oxley onward, is the standing objective of the profession’s oversight regimes. (Wikipedia — PwC)
Independence through separation: the federation structure — collaborating but legally separate firms — kept the global brand from carrying global liability, the same separation the successor network declares when it says member firms are distinct legal entities. (Wikipedia — PwC)
For researchers — three pairing disciplines: first, do not pair Isla Lipana & Co. with Coopers & Lybrand — the Isla Lipana name belongs to the Price Waterhouse lineage, and the C&L side of 1998 reached the Philippine network only through the global combination; second, do not project the Isla Lipana name before 2005 — the Price Waterhouse seat was Joaquin Cunanan & Co. from 1964; third, do not call the 2005 change a merger — the firm’s own history records a change of name within one continuing practice. Price Waterhouse proper is a 1849–1998 subject; anything later belongs to PricewaterhouseCoopers and PwC. (PwC Philippines — Our History, Wikipedia — PwC)

Historical Context

The firm belongs to the founding century of the British accountancy profession: Price opened at No. 5 Gresham Street in 1849, the 1865 partnership brought in Edwin Waterhouse, and from 1874 the surviving pair’s names made the firm’s — a firm that by the late nineteenth century ranked with the leaders of London practice and crossed the Atlantic with the New York office of 1890. In 1989 merger talks with Arthur Andersen collapsed — conflicts including Andersen’s IBM consulting ties against the firm’s IBM audit — and the right partner arrived in 1998, when Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand to form PricewaterhouseCoopers, shortened to PwC from September 2010. The regulatory aftermath came quickly: Enron and WorldCom destroyed Arthur Andersen and produced Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002, whose limits on audit–consulting overlap forced the consulting divestiture — the “Monday” spin-off sold to IBM for roughly US$3.5 billion. (Wikipedia — PwC)

The Philippine thread runs through every period. The practice that became the Price Waterhouse seat was founded in Manila in 1922, passed to Filipino senior partnership under Joaquin Cunanan in 1956, was designated the firm’s Philippine correspondent in 1958, traded from 1964 as Joaquin Cunanan & Co., joined Price Waterhouse International in 1973, and seated de la Paz-Bernardo as the firm’s first woman senior partner worldwide in 1981. The 1998 global merger carried it into PricewaterhouseCoopers, and in 2005 the partnership took its present name, Isla Lipana & Co. — PwC Philippines, the oldest counted franchise in the local profession. (PwC Philippines — Our History)

Challenges and Controversies

The Philippine Pairing Error

A recurring error pairs Isla Lipana & Co. with Coopers & Lybrand and Joaquin Cunanan & Co. with Price Waterhouse, as though two local firms represented the two global houses. The firm’s own history records one Philippine practice throughout: it carried Price Waterhouse’s flag from the 1958 correspondent designation through membership of Price Waterhouse International from 1973, and its 2005 renaming to Isla Lipana & Co. was a renaming of that same firm, not the emergence of a separate C&L house. (PwC Philippines — Our History)

2005: A Renaming, Not a Merger

The change from Joaquin Cunanan & Co. to Isla Lipana & Co. is often misread as a merger or absorption. The firm’s own timeline records it plainly — “The company name changes to Isla Lipana & Co.” — the adoption of the senior partners’ surnames, exactly as the practice had adopted Cunanan’s in 1964. (PwC Philippines — Our History)

The Andersen Talks and the Consulting Split

The failed 1989 merger with Arthur Andersen — broken by conflicts such as Andersen’s IBM ties against the firm’s IBM audit — delayed by a decade the consolidation that 1998 delivered; and the post-Enron consulting separation, with the widely mocked “Monday” brand, is remembered as the price of preserving the audit franchise under Sarbanes-Oxley. (Wikipedia — PwC)