DealZone

Highlights from this week’s Thomson Reuters Investment Banking Scorecard:

6TH LARGEST IPO OF THE YEAR
In this week’s second largest ECM transaction Sands China, the Macau operations of US based Las Vegas Sands raised $2.5 billion on the Hong Kong stock exchange. It is the 6th largest IPO of the year and the second of its kind in a couple of months after Wynn Macau, a subsidiary of US based Wynn Resorts raised $1.9 billion in September.
Follow On activity is up 35% when compared to the same period last year with $528 billion and it also accounts for 75% of total ECM activity so far this year.

GLOBAL CORPORATE BOND ISSUANCE UP
The top two bonds issued this week are both investment grade corporate debt issues which are both above the $1 billion mark. UNEDIC and CDP Financials with $5.9 billion and $4.9 billion.
Global corporate bonds reached $2.4 trillion so far this year up 11% when compared to the same period last year. Corporate bond issuance also makes up 46% of total bond activity this year.

M&A HITS 5 MONTH-HIGH
Global announced M&A in November totaled $234 billion and marks the second busiest monthly level of activity of the last twelve months after June 2009 ($275 billion).
There were ten transactions in excess of $1 billion announced this week, including the $1.7 billion takeover of UK based JPMorgan Cazenove by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Much has been made recently of the drop in activity in European loan market activity and the corresponding boom in bonds and equities, which was recently highlighted by Reuters columnist Alexander Smith in this article. But while the loan market is undoubtedly down, it is far from out. The flow of bond and equity issuance is feeding cash back into the loan market, and liquidity has clearly improved in the last month, allowing a number of deals to close oversubscribed.

I wrote this story summarising the stronger tone in the market and highlighting the relationship between the loan market and M&A financing which could quickly boost loan volume when M&A activity picks up.

Preliminary first-quarter data from Thomson Reuters on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and capital markets are out. And unsurprisingly, spring has not sprung in investment banking, with the big exception of a record deluge of corporate bonds.

Fees across investment banking (M&A, loans, and debt and equity capital markets) halved, while fees for completed M&A topped that with a 68 percent fall. Overall announced M&A fell by a third, compared to the same period last year, to $444 billion.

And even that figure is flattered by two huge pharma deals, which bankers doubt will be followed by more of the same, and a flurry of bank bailouts.