JPMorgan is the standout winner of the award for the region’s best bank for advisory. According to Dealogic data, the firm advised on 22 completed M&A transactions in the year to the end of March 2022 worth a total of $66.51 billion, giving it a 34.2% market share. No other investment bank came close in terms of either deal volume or deal count.
Sometimes regional data can be skewed by a single, blowout deal or by a handful of large, connected transactions by a longstanding corporate or financial client. In any given year a bank can get lucky; so a key question is whether a bank is active in multiple sectors and markets.
In JPMorgan’s case, the answer this year is an emphatic yes. The US bank was sole financial adviser to National Commercial Bank on its merger with Riyadh-based Samba Financial Group. The $21.7 billion deal was completed in April 2021, with the two parties coming together to form Saudi National Bank, now the largest lender in the kingdom, with assets of more than SR900 billion ($240 billion).
“Historically, sectors like energy and banking were the most active in the region,” says Georges Massoud, head of M&A for the Middle East and north Africa region at JPMorgan. “More recently however, other sectors have witnessed increased activity as many regional companies have now become more scalable and are starting to look more seriously for shareholder value creation through expansion opportunities.”
Another keystone deal finalized in the kingdom last year saw Saudi Aramco sell a 49% stake in its natural gas pipelines business to an investor group led by BlackRock, and including China’s Silk Road Fund, Saudi Arabia’s Hassana Investment and Keppel Infrastructure Trust, for $15.5 billion. JPMorgan advised Aramco on the sale, which also included a new long-term pact with BlackRock to explore low-carbon energy projects.
It wasn’t just about Saudi Arabia. In August 2021, JPMorgan advised Denmark’s DSV Panalpina on its acquisition of Kuwait-based Agility Public Warehousing, in an all-share deal worth $4.9 billion. The sale transformed DSV overnight into the world’s third-largest freight forwarding company, with 75,000 employees and an annual turnover of $26 billion.
During the awards period, JPMorgan “successfully executed some of the largest deals in our history,” notes Massoud. “We see this award as the culmination of years of investment by the firm in its clients and its people. The Middle East has been one of the fastest growing regions from an M&A standpoint, which has certainly helped attract talent from all over the world.”
We see this award as the culmination of years of investment by the firm in its clients and its people
Georges Massoud
In Doha, the US firm advised Al Khalij Commercial Bank on its merger with Masraf Al Rayan in a $2.23 billion deal that created the second-largest Islamic banking entity in Qatar, with more than QR182 billion ($50 billion) in total assets.
Two more deals deserve mention. The first involved the merger of digital ad company Taboola with ION Acquisition Corp, an Israel-based special purpose acquisition company (Spac). The two sides joined forces in June 2021, with Taboola immediately going public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. JPMorgan was a co-financial adviser to Taboola.
The other was the merger of another Israeli firm, Cellebrite, a global leader in digital intelligence solutions, with TWC Tech Holdings, a US-based Spac. The $1.94 billion deal was completed in August 2021, with JPMorgan acting as a financial adviser to Cellebrite.
