hav Mittal’s career at Archer Daniels Midland — a company operating across dozens of countries with one of the most expansive global footprints in agribusiness — has placed him squarely in that environment.
Why Cross-Border Deals Fail Where Domestic Ones Do Not
The mechanics of a domestic acquisition and a cross-border one are, at the surface level, similar. Both require financial modeling, due diligence, valuation, structuring, and negotiation. What diverges is the complexity underneath each of those steps.
In a cross-border deal, the due diligence scope expands significantly. Legal frameworks governing labor, environmental liability, tax treatment, and asset ownership vary by jurisdiction — and material misunderstandings in any of these areas can erode deal value or create post-close liability. Regulatory approval processes in multiple countries may run on different timelines, introducing uncertainty into deal certainty and closing conditions. Foreign exchange and currency risk must be modeled into the transaction economics. And the counterparty’s expectations around deal structure, governance rights, and management continuity may differ substantially from domestic norms.
Leading international M&A at ADM means operating across all of these dimensions simultaneously. Mittal’s role as VP and Global Head of Business Development and M&A encompasses the full scope of ADM’s cross-border transaction activity — acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures, and strategic partnerships across geographies where agribusiness opportunity and risk are both elevated.
The Role of Due Diligence Depth in International Contexts
Due diligence is where cross-border deals are won or lost. The gap between what a target company represents and what it actually is tends to be wider in international transactions — because information quality, accounting standards, and disclosure norms vary significantly across markets. An executive leading this work must know which risks to prioritize, which information gaps are acceptable, and which uncertainties require specific contractual protection.
Mittal’s approach to transaction execution reflects the analytical rigor developed across more than two decades of corporate development work at ADM and Kellogg Company. At Kellogg, he led cross-border investment and M&A initiatives as part of his global corporate development mandate — evaluating and executing transactions across international markets before bringing that experience into the considerably larger scale of ADM’s global portfolio.
His dual credentials — the CFA designation, which develops depth in financial analysis and asset valuation, and the Harvard MBA concentration in Finance and Strategy — provide a technical foundation that is directly applicable to the valuation and due diligence rigor that cross-border transactions demand.
Joint Ventures as an Entry Strategy in Complex Markets
Not every international market is suitable for outright acquisition. Regulatory restrictions, local partnership requirements, limited information on target quality, or the strategic preference for a lower-commitment entry point can make joint venture structures the appropriate vehicle for international expansion. Designing these structures well — with governance arrangements that protect the company’s interests, exit provisions that do not trap capital, and incentive alignment that keeps the partnership productive over time — is a distinct capability within international corporate development.
Mittal’s transaction portfolio at ADM includes joint venture structures alongside acquisitions and divestitures. The governance design work involved in establishing a joint venture in an international market requires anticipating how the partnership will perform under stress — when market conditions deteriorate, when partners’ strategic priorities diverge, or when one party wants to exit. Getting those provisions right at the front end determines how manageable those situations are when they arise.
In agribusiness, where ADM’s international operations span emerging and developed markets alike, joint ventures frequently serve as the structure of choice in markets where full ownership is either not available or not strategically optimal. Executing these transactions effectively requires both the financial sophistication to model the economics and the organizational experience to know where governance arrangements tend to break down.
Building Post-Close Value Across Geographies
Closing a cross-border transaction is a milestone, not an outcome. The value thesis that justified the deal must be realized through post-close integration — aligning operating models, extracting synergies, and retaining the talent and commercial relationships that made the target valuable in the first place. International integration amplifies the difficulty of all of these activities.
Mittal’s background in post-merger integration work, which extends to his consulting tenure at Booz & Company where PMI was a core service line, informs how he approaches the transition from transaction close to value delivery. At ADM’s scale, integration programs run across multiple geographies and business functions simultaneously, requiring the same program governance discipline that Mittal applied to restructuring programs at Kellogg.
The ability to hold together a post-close integration program across international operations — maintaining deal thesis clarity, managing cultural integration, and tracking synergy realization against the business case — is what separates transactions that deliver the value they promised from those that produce synergy estimates that never materialize.
About Anubhav Mittal
Anubhav Mittal is a senior finance, corporate development, and value-creation executive with more than two decades of experience leading strategy, M&A, capital allocation, restructuring, and business transformation across global public companies. He currently serves as VP and Global Head of Business Development and M&A at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Previously, he held CFO-level and senior finance leadership roles within ADM and at Kellogg Company, and began his career at Booz & Company. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School with a concentration in Finance and Strategy, and a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, graduating in the top 5% of his class. He holds the CFA and CMA designations and is based in Chicago, Illinois.
