Mark M. Whitlinger CMA, CFM
Mark Whitlinger helps companies assess corporate investments, formulate corporate strategy, and manage long-term capital for over thirty years. He initially gained this experience at the Consolidated Natural Gas Company (CNG), a Fortune 500 integrated natural gas company with oil and gas exploration and production, pipeline and local distribution company operations. He continued to serve companies in these areas through several consulting practices, and then through several investment strategy and analysis roles at the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco), the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, with 25% of the world’s oil reserves and worldwide presence in petroleum refining, products marketing and petrochemicals manufacturing. He recently returned to consulting practice with the formation of Morgan Whitlinger Consulting LLC.
Mark combines strategic insight with practical business knowledge to aid senior management in assessing and determining corporate strategy. Working with senior management and the Board of Directors of CNG, he participated in developing an acquisition-based corporate growth strategy. Also, as a lead member of the Company’s Merger and Acquisition team, he was involved in implementing the strategy, developing targets, negotiating merger agreements, managing due diligence operations and constructing pro forma financial analyses. This included participating in strategic funding discussions, presenting executive management and Board briefings, and directing the company’s long-range financial forecasting process.
While at CNG, Mark directed all phases of a corporate finance program to ensure appropriate capitalization. He was responsible for managing the capital structure, including debt and equity transactions, $1 billion daily funding program, and the evaluation, approval, reporting and post-auditing of a $1.3 billion annual capital and expense budget. Mark managed relationships with
commercial banks, investment banks, and credit rating agencies.
In supporting the strategic framework of the Company, he managed the corporate-wide planning process, established performance metrics for all business lines, and coordinated all business plan review meetings between operating units and executive management.
These activities continued at Saudi Aramco, where Mark directed a professional team in financial modeling and analysis of downstream joint ventures and M&A projects, including valuation and project economics, and project finance analysis. In this capacity, he advised senior management of appropriate relative valuations for several acquisitions and a divestiture, including the relative valuation of the key business components to set negotiation parameters for achieving a 50/50 value split for the dissolution of a US-based refinery joint venture. He also led the Saudi Aramco team responsible for determining the optimal post-split capital structure and credit ratings for the surviving entity that was wholly-owned by the Company.
He also represented the Company’s financial interests in the development, acquisition and divestiture of joint ventures in the refining segment, including financial negotiations for the third-party contracting of a hydrogen generation unit for an in-Kingdom, world scale, full conversion refinery JV.
Mark led and conducted project financing debt capacity analyses and economic evaluations for numerous multi-billion dollar joint-venture projects, including for a $20 billion petrochemical complex and multiple domestic and international refinery investments.
In private consulting practice, Mark provided business operations, business planning and capital management consulting services to private and corporate business clients. Key projects included: conducting commercial application testing of a new treasury optimization product for a software developer, conducting comparative studies to determine value-added of nontraditional marketing channels for a retail marketing division of a major integrated energy company, and managing a PeopleSoft post-implementation project to correct billing and accounting deficiencies for a national staffing company.
Mark holds a BA in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA in Finance from the Katz Graduate School of Business. He is a Certified Management Accountant, a Certified Financial Manager and a member of the Institute of Management Accountants.