Completed Middle East M&A volumes more than doubled to $110 billion in this awards period, according to Dealogic – although the number of deals fell by about a quarter. Teva’s acquisition of Allergan made up around a third of the volume on its own. The purchase of a 19.5% stake in Rosneft by Glencore and Qatar Investment Authority made up another 10th.
The bank that acted on almost 50% of M&A deal volume was JPMorgan, which rose up the M&A advisory ranking from third to a clear first, with almost 10 percentage points more market share than Barclays, the next ranked bank and last year’s winner, and more than twice the number of deals worked on by the UK bank (14 to Barclays’ five). This is a reflection of a beefed-up presence in the region that has seen the US firm roughly double its Middle East headcount in recent years to around 200.
Its deals during the period included acting as exclusive financial adviser to the Public Investment Fund on its $3.5 billion investment in Uber via a private placement of preferred stock: a deal taken as a herald of a more risk-hungry approach to sovereign wealth investing by Saudi Arabia.