Although the biggest universal banks regularly appear higher up the M&A advisory league tables by transaction value, Rothschild & Co works on far more deals than any competitor. According to Dealogic it advised on 222 deals in the 12 months under review compared with Goldman Sachs’s 132.
The firm has the largest number of advisory bankers in the region – around 800 – with dual headquarters in Paris and London and teams of local specialists in 15 other offices in western Europe.
As well as advising on a large number of medium-sized deals, it played prominent roles in three of the top-10 deals of the period: advising Snam on the Italian energy infrastructure operator’s joint acquisition of a 49% stake in Adnoc’s gas pipelines with an enterprise value of $20.7 billion; French payments company Ingenico Group on the $21 billion acquisition by Worldline; and the consortium led by Advent, Cinven and Germany’s RAG on the €17.2 billion purchase of thyssenkrupp’s elevator business.
The latter was a key moment during the Covid crisis; with a large private equity deal that had been announced before the lockdowns, and which drew in sovereign wealth funds GIC and Adia as strategic capital providers, completing in June. Rothschild & Co has longstanding relationships with Advent and Cinven and had also previously offered general strategic and M&A advice to thyssenkrupp.
“In a period of crisis, clients do tend to talk first to the people they trust and with whom they have longstanding relationships and we benefited from that,” says Ravi Gupta, partner, co-head of UK and global co-head of industrials, global advisory at Rothschild & Co.
Although M&A revived strongly after September 2020, the real story in the first six months of the period under review was financing advisory, a discipline that Rothschild & Co pioneered in equity and debt. “We came into this period with a deal pipeline heavily weighted to sell-side M&A but were able to shift our resources quickly and respond to clients who needed advice on liquidity and capital,” says Philippe Le Bourgeois, partner and chief operating officer, global advisory at Rothschild & Co.
Highlights include advising the German government on the €9 billion stabilization package of Deutsche Lufthansa and IAG on the first-ever rights issue for a dual-listed company on Madrid and London, which raised €2.74 billion.
