Barclays‘ investment bank is having its moment in the sun.
The British bank is involved in two big deals that were announced Monday, advising Dish Network on its $25.5 billion offer for Sprint Nextel and working with Thermo Fisher Scientific on its $13.6 billion acquisition of Life Technologies.
In addition to fees, Barclays is getting sought-after bragging rights. The deals vault the bank to third place from eighth in the global league tables for mergers and acquisitions so far this year, according to Thomson Reuters data.
The investment bank now commands a 17.4 percent market share, ahead of Morgan Stanley and behind only JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, according to Thomson Reuters. On Friday, the market share was 10.3 percent.
It’s a welcome development for the investment bank, which is undergoing staff reductions under the chief executive of Barclays, Antony P. Jenkins, who took over last year after the rate-rigging scandal.
After emerging as a major player in global deal making with the acquisition of Lehman Brothers assets in 2008, Barclays’s investment bank has won business in part by offering financing in addition to advice.
Those services were evident in the Life Technologies deal, which would allow Thermo Fisher to expand its market share in the production of genetic sequencing machines. Barclays and JPMorgan Chase, the two advisers to Thermo Fisher, are also providing bridge financing for the deal.
As the adviser to Dish, Barclays is in a position to reap significant fees. The pay-TV company’s offer for Sprint is a challenge to the planned deal with the Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank, which agreed in October to acquire a 70 percent stake in Sprint for about $20 billion.
Dish began serious discussions with advisers in February about an offer for Sprint, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
But the chairman of Dish, Charles W. Ergen, had been laying the groundwork for a telecommunications deal for some time, hunting for wireless spectrum and making an offer for Clearwire in January.
The deal for Life Technologies was finalized over the weekend, after a competitive auction, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Thermo Fisher approached the company after news leaked that it was exploring a sale, the person said.
