Awards for Excellence 2018
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In a tightly contested award, we seriously considered six names for best advisory bank this year. Goldman Sachs won out in something of a comeback after a difficult couple of years in Asia.
We could point to the league tables and share of wallet, both of which put Goldman as the leader, but that is not enough to win this award. After all, completed M&A tables remain distorted one last time by ChemChina-Syngenta (in which Goldman advised the sell side), a deal we look forward to never considering again after skewing the numbers for three successive years.
Much more relevant is the number of deals – 92 announced – and the range of places and sectors they cover. This is increasingly important as the dominance of outbound M&A from China fades. John Kim is head of M&A for Asia ex-Japan.
Japan, an area of particular strength, is covered in more detail in the separate country award, but there were highlights throughout the region, including Zurich Insurance’s purchase of OnePath Life Australia, Legend Holdings buying Banque Internationale à Luxembourg, China Development Financial Holding taking a chunk of China Life Insurance (Taiwan) and the sale of a stake in Uber to a group including Softbank and Tencent.
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| John Kim |
In particular, Goldman looked good in private equity M&A transactions, being part of the advisory team (albeit arriving on the ticket later than counterpart Citi) that helped Hillhouse Capital, Hopu Investment Management and others buy Global Logistics Properties from Singapore sovereign fund GIC, as well as its work for Toshiba, which is covered in our Japan section.
There were plenty more. Goldman’s only-the-best-clients model can look unwieldy in an environment where new tech and pharma leaders appear seemingly overnight, but the bank does appear to have rounded its approach sufficiently to be not only relevant but a leader.
