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Besides the usual disclaimers (see below), it should also be noted that the exits in question are only for previously announced or reported auctions, and that the data is almost (if not definitely) sure to be incomplete and can only be viewed as a rough gauge of auction-related exits.
As you can see, the "spread" between hires and exits is most pronounced with Goldman, Sachs & Co. Hired to run at least 17 auctions this year, the venerable Wall Street institution has, according to our records, managed only eight exits. To find a successful exit, we had to go all the way back to July, when Goldman engineered the $525 million sale of Contec Holdings from American Capital Strategies to Bain Holdings. Canceled auctions also weighed on Goldman. We tracked five of these (it should also be noted that this year's tally of exits and cancellations have no relation to the number of hires, as exits and cancellations could and often do come from auctions that began well before January). Not included in the canceled auctions column is U.K. Life insurer Friends Provident, which appears to be on life support. J.P. Morgan is on the hook there as well. That was J.P. Morgan's only auction-related blemish we could find. The firm also ran the Weather Channel auction for Landmark Communications, engineering its reported $3.5 billion exit to NBC Universal. For Merrill Lynch, which this year had more successful exits than any other firm we tracked, there were plenty of cancellations to note as well. With 10 cancellations, Merrill led even Goldman. Interestingly, several of its more high-profile cancellations were with European clients: Northern Rock, which is now a property of the U.K. Government, and Alitalia. - Nathaniel Baker About the table: Several times a week or more, there is news about a company hiring an investment bank "to explore strategic alternatives." Sometimes the phrase "including a sale" or "including a possible sale" is tacked on at the end of the statement. Other times the company is less obvious about its want/need to unload assets. In merger arbitrage land, the news triggers a set of Pavlovian responses, usually taking the form of a series of questions: What company did this? Why? Was it due to activist pressure? Earnings disappointments? A combination? More importantly, should we long this stock? If not, do we get in now? Who might buy? How likely is this to happen? Do we short them? Poor arbs. It is said their lives are nothing but long stretches of boredom interspersed with moments of stark panic. (Or maybe that was pilots?) Private equity firms flush with cash will of course take interest for a different reason -- as a potential bidder for some of the companies' assets, or perhaps even for the companies themselves. Lost in all this is the business done by the advisory firm that was hired to conduct the review. Just who are these guys, and how much business are they doing? This blog series was born of an attempt to answer this question and shed some light on this niche of the investment banking world. The below chart is a stab at putting it all into context. To narrow the scope somewhat, we have limited the data to new auctions announced during the 2008 calendar year. Unlike "traditional" league tables, which usually attempt to track revenues, this table is ordered by the number of new clients signed year-to-date by a particular firm. (Not all companies identify the firm they hired to conduct their review, though The Deal reporters are often able to dig this information up through sources. Still, the table will by definition be incomplete for this reason.) Categories Deal Video
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These being the dog days of August, there was scarcely any hiring activity to report, much less any that would affect our league table. Instead, I decided to take a look at exit activity this year, and there are some interesting findings to report.
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