"The sentiment towards Brazil is very high at the moment. The Santander IPO doesn’t represent the peak of the market – there are still many other equity deals in the pipeline. We are already pitching companies to go public in the second quarter of 2010," says Evandro Pereira, head of capital markets at BTG Pactual.
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| the size of Santander’s Brazilian IPO, the biggest this year |
On October 6 Santander priced its Brazilian unit’s IPO. Santander and Credit Suisse led the deal with BTG Pactual and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The deal raised $7 billion, the world’s largest IPO so far this year, and gave the subsidiary a bigger market value than Deutsche Bank. Before Santander came to market there had already been a series of large equity deals in Brazil, including credit card company Visanet’s $4.26 billion IPO in June and Brasil Foods’ $2.76 billion follow-on in July. In addition, smaller deals from real estate companies and consumer-dependent sectors have been well received.
However, in the days before Santander came to market, Tivit, a Brazilian computer services company, reportedly had a hard time pricing its $320 million IPO.