Emerging Markets Best equity house: UBS

Euromoney Awards for Excellence 2006Emerging markets Best bank I Emerging Markets Best investment bank I Emerging Markets Best debt house I Emerging Markets Best equity house I Emerging Markets Best M&A house

Last month, Bank of China listed its shares in Hong Kong, raising $11.3 billion in the process (following the exercise of the greenshoe option). Despite market volatility, the deal was the fourth-biggest IPO in history. One of the three underwriters was UBS, demonstrating once again the Swiss bank’s ability to execute the highest-profile equity deals. But UBS doesn’t win this award purely for lead managing blockbuster transactions. What impresses most is its presence in less glamorous but equally important deals in all the emerging regions.

Take its business in Latin America, for example. While the bank acted as a bookrunner on Unibanco’s $758 million secondary offering, the biggest equity deal in Brazil last year, arguably its more interesting trades in the region were two relatively small IPOs: Banco Macro Bansud’s $278 million listing on the New York Stock Exchange, which is the first equity offering in Argentina since 2001, and Inversiones Aguas Metropolitanas’s $398 million transaction, which is the first internationally distributed IPO in Chile.