Tuesday July 20 1999
Perseus Marconi, executive chairman of Sigma Banking Group, a €20 billion conglomerate based in Amsterdam, rides a limo from his canal-side residence to the bank's space-age headquarters in Foppingadreef. He is delighted with his London-based investment bank's huge underwriting of a €5 billion equity issue for Hermes, a UK-based phone and satellite company, not to mention a sister issue of €3 billion in high-yield bonds. For Marconi, this is the future, the fusion of banking and telecommunications into a single sector - finance and information delivered instantly to any point on the globe - and beyond!
Things have been looking better by the day. A thriving Europe has slowly been pulling world markets out of recession. Stock markets have made up a lot of the ground they lost in the second half of 1998. Even bank stocks are improving.
Marconi riffles through his Financial Times hardly glancing at a news item buried at the foot of the front page: "Mobile phone scare widens". But at Sigma's offices the dealing room has already been in uproar for two hours. The US market last night and the Asian markets this morning took the phone scare seriously, dumping any stocks that had been buoyed by mobile phone hardware or franchises and, incidentally, satellite communications too.