BEST BANK
UBS
BEST DEBT HOUSE
CSFB
BEST EQUITY HOUSE
CSFB
BEST M&A HOUSE
Goldman Sachs
The perennial battle between CSFB and UBS for the title of best bank in Switzerland is won this year by UBS. Its drive to attract new clients has delivered impressive market share in retail banking. In Switzerland, UBS has about 3.5 million individual client accounts, about 25% of the savings and mortgage markets for individuals, and 32% of the country’s credit card business. UBS has 301 branches in Switzerland and is introducing a “two-zone” policy whereby customers can process every-day transactions through an ATM, or speak to a client adviser on more complicated matters. On the institutional side, UBS has nearly 145,000 corporate clients, including nearly 7,500 large companies, while its payment, securities, and custodial services for financial institutions support UBS Investment Bank’s ‘Bank for Banks’ strategy.
CSFB beats UBS by a large margin in the debt capital markets business according to Bondware. From May 2004 to April 2005, it managed eight bond issues worth $871 million for Swiss corporates, compared with UBS’s two deals worth $293 million. It managed 89 issues worth SFr18.5 billion ($14.5 billion) for international issuers in Swiss francs, against UBS’s 74 deals worth SFr14 billion. More contentiously, CSFB enjoyed the dominant share of the domestic Swiss franc market, with 28% of deal volume to UBS’s 19%. Although this includes some business that might be considered captive, such as Pfandbriefbank’s debt deals, CSFB’s strength across the board makes it this year’s winner.
Excluding self-managed deals, CSFB and UBS both worked on nine Swiss equity or equity-linked offerings from May 2004 to April 2005. CSFB’s deals were worth A1.74 billion, giving it a market share of 29% and making it this year’s winner (excluding equity-linked deals, UBS has a slightly larger market share, with 26% to CSFB’s 22%). CSFB worked on a broad range of ECM deals, including IPOs, rights offerings, accelerated book-builds, and convertibles. Highlights were the SFr204 million IPO of Ypsomed Holding. This was a potentially tricky deal, with Ypsomed, which makes drugs equipment, highly dependent on Aventis’s insulin product Lantus. As sole lead bookrunner, UBS put together a book that covered the offering over seven times and at the top of the price range. In May, they were trading 72% up. CSFB was also sole bookrunner and joint lead manager on Swiss Prime Site’s SFr170 million convertible – the first European convertible of 2005 and the first traditional real estate convertible in Europe for over a year.
In 2004/05, Goldman Sachs married its strategic commitment to Switzerland with a shrewd sector focus on the highly technical areas of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals to advise on three out of the country’s top seven M&A deals. Goldman advised Bayer on its $3 billion acquisition of Roche’s OTC business, and Novartis on the $565 million acquisition of Sabex. It also advised AstraZeneca and Royal Cosun on the $474 million sale of Advanta Sees to Syngenta. Working on such high-profile, high-value deals gave Goldman a 40% share of the Swiss M&A market by volume, and it advised on more deals than any of its non-Swiss competitors. In the Bayer-Roche deal, the acquirer beat off competition from other possible trade buyers and from private-equity funds.
