NM Rothschild & Sons, a leading investment banking major, is looking at introducing IPO (initial public offer) advisory to expand its bouquet of services in India. The firm currently offers these services to clients in Europe.
NM Rothschild and Sons (India) Pvt Ltd, the Indian arm of the European investment banking major NM Rothschild and Sons, will continue to focus on mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and debt and equity raising.
“Our established presence in M&A will continue to be our mainstay, along with restructuring and advisory to companies on raising debt and equity,” Sanjay Bhanarkar, Managing Director, Rothschild India, said.
The bank has recently increased its headcount to over 22 and is likely to add a few mid-to-senior level bankers to take the team strength to 30-35. But it is not clear how many of them will be for the IPO advisory practise.
Rothschild is one of the prolific deal makers in the Indian market involved in several big ticket cross border deals including Tata Steel Ltd’s Corus acquisition, GMR’s acquisition of Dutch power company InterGen NV and the acquisition of English Premier League football club Blackburn Rovers by the promoters of Venkateshwara Hatcheries. It also advised Aircel in the telecom towers sale to GTL Infrastructure Ltd. Its recent big ticket deal is Cairn India’s proposed acquisition by Vedanta Resources Plc, where the firm is advising Cairn India. Rothschild advised the Government of India on 3G auction to raise around Rs 65,000 crore.
Rothschild's Equity Capital Markets Advisory offers services to firms raising equity capital. Transactions may include primary and secondary offerings, including IPOs, block trades, accelerated book build transactions, rights issues, share buybacks, convertible and exchangeable bonds. In India, Rothschild had successfully done ECM advisory during the IPO of Cairn India and ENIL (Radio Mirchi, a Bennet, Coleman & Company subsidiary) IPO.