Issuer: BSkyB
Date: October 1998
Amount: £430 million ($735 million)
Global coordinator: BT Alex Brown
“We started the briefing sales meeting at 3:30 on a worldwide conference call. At 4:00 we had a rule of silence to collect our thoughts and work out who to call first. We went live at 4:15 and at 4:23 it was done,” remembers Edmond Warner, head of pan-European equities at BT Alex Brown.
It takes speed and guts to do a successful block trade during a global crisis. Last October, BT Alex Brown sold £430 million ($735 million) worth of concept shares for Granada in just eight minutes—and proved its pluck.
“It was very much a binary transaction,” says Warner. “The market was saying if the name is right, we’ll love it and if it’s wrong we don’t want any of it. If it was a different name or a different price it would have been a complete failure.”
What made the deal potentially more difficult was that BSkyB was in talks to buy Manchester United, so all trades had to be reported. “In our thinking it was a double-edged sword.