This was, as is the norm, a fight between Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. This year the award changes hands between them and goes to Morgan Stanley for the breadth of its successes.
Our review period covered a quite extraordinary range of market circumstances and external influences, and it was important to us that the winner of this award could demonstrate an ability to come through for clients throughout.
Morgan Stanley was not on the top of the league tables for equity capital markets in our review period – that was Goldman – but it did impress for the scale of its activity. It was a leader on arguably the most high-profile transactions in each of South Korea (LG Energy Solution), China (Didi), India (Paytm), Southeast Asia (Grab), Australia (Transurban), Indonesia (Mitratel), Thailand (Ngern Tid Lor) and Japan (Renesas).
Three of those deals fared poorly afterwards, whether for reasons of tech rotation, rising inflation or unpredictable Chinese regulation, but in each case one can find a better, smaller and more important deal waiting in the wings: the impressive Zomato IPO in India, for example, or the $14.7