Comcast’s $45.2 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable has shaken up a ranking of the biggest deal makers.
Morgan Stanley, which advised Time Warner Cable, jumped ahead of competitors including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Allen & Company to lead the Thomson Reuters list of merger and acquisition financial advisers for 2014. The bank has advised on $124.1 billion worth of deal so far this year, or 32 percent of all M.&A. activity, according to Thomson Reuters.
The man on the other side of the negotiating table, advising Comcast, also got a bump. Paul J. Taubman, who up until recently co-led Morgan Stanley’s securities business, now shares the 10th spot on Thomson Reuters’s list with Allen & Company, one of the advisers to Time Warner Cable.
The Time Warner Cable acquisition is the largest so far in 2014, and the third-largest to be completed since the financial crisis, according to Thomson Reuters. The deal helped worldwide merger activity jump to $391.1 billion this year, up 55 percent compared to the same period last year.
The transaction drew in some of the biggest bankers in the industry, and they’ll be reaping a major windfall for their efforts. Comcast’s advisers, who also included James B. Lee Jr., JPMorgan’s top deal maker; Barclays; Davis Polk & Wardwell; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher, could earn as much as $68 million in fees, according to estimates from Freeman & Company.
Mr. Lee has been a longtime adviser to Comcast’s founding Roberts family as it built a tiny cable operator in Tupelo, Miss., into the colossus of today. It was Mr. Lee who arranged a clandestine meeting between Ralph J. Roberts, the company’s patriarch, and General Electric’s chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, on a golf course in Idaho nearly five years ago, setting in motion G.E.’s sale of NBCUniversal to the cable company.
Mr. Taubman has also been at Comcast’s side for years, serving as the top outside advisor to Comcast’s chief executive, Brian L. Roberts, in the NBC acquisition. Since leaving Morgan Stanley a little over a year ago, he has become a one-man mergers powerhouse, having advised Verizon in its deal to buy back the 45 percent stake in its wireless business held by Vodafone for $130 billion.
Time Warner Cable also had top-name advisers on its side. Among them was Robert Kindler, Morgan Stanley’s global head of mergers and acquisitions, who has long counted the cable company as a client.
Another was Blair Effron, a co-founder of the boutique investment bank Centerview Partners who helped sell H.J. Heinz to Warren E. Buffett and the Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paolo Lemann for $23 billion. Mr. Effron was brought in to advise Time Warner Cable’s board.
Time Warner Cable’s advisers could make as much as $75 million on the deal.
Comcast’s winning bid for Time Warner Cable came at the expense of Charter Communications, which had for months been exploring a deal to buy the cable provider. Charter’s advisers, which include Goldman Sachs and LionTree Advisors, now stand to make minimal fees.
