Awards for Excellence 2019
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In a year of mega deals, one bank – and not the one most might have expected – stood out from the lot. That bank was Goldman Sachs, this year’s best bank for advisory in the Middle East.
It worked on $102 billion-worth of mergers and acquisitions, via 14 deals, putting it well ahead of the other global banks that shone over the past year in the region. Over the past five years, Goldman Sachs ranked fourth on average, making its performance over the past year all the more remarkable.
As adviser to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Goldman Sachs worked on Saudi Aramco’s $69 billion purchase, signed in March, of a 70% stake in Saudi Basic Industries Co from PIF. The agreement could vastly help PIF fund its efforts to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil, as laid out in the kingdom’s Vision 2030 programme.
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Wassim Younan |
That deal, the largest ever M&A transaction in the Middle East and North Africa – under the leadership of regional CEO Wassim Younan – would validate a whole year of business by itself.
But Goldman Sachs did far more than that, advising Abu Dhabi’s national oil company ADNOC on the largest refinery transaction globally announced over the past year: ADNOC’s $5.8 billion stake sale in ADNOC Refining to Italy’s Eni and Austria’s OMV.
The bank also advised Saudi British Bank on its $5 billion acquisition of Alawwal Bank, to form Saudi Arabia’s third largest lender. That deal was the largest banking M&A transaction anywhere in the world last year.
The bank also acted as exclusive financial adviser to Mubadala Capital, the investment arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, to sell its 60% equity interest in EMI Music Publishing to Sony Corporation based on an enterprise value of $4.75 billion.
Banks such as JPMorgan, Bank of America, HSBC or Citi, which have long had a strong presence in the region, especially when it comes to advisory work, can certainly be expected to fight to reclaim the top spot next year, but for now it is firmly in Goldman’s hands.
