There's big money being made from the massive Verizon (VZ 3.33%) buyout of Vodafone's stake in Verizon Wireless. And I'm not talking about shareholders at Vodafone. I'm talking about the investment bankers.
Obviously, there were big bucks to be made from the merger deal fees for the gigantic $130 billion takeover. But it didn't stop there. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that Verizon completed the sale of $49 billion in debt. Those new bonds don't just structure and sell themselves.
Barclays, Bank of America's (BAC 1.59%) Merrill Lynch unit, JPMorgan (JPM 1.20%), and Morgan Stanley were the lead underwriters on the deal, but a small army of other banks -- including Citigroup (C 2.46%), Credit Suisse, and Wells Fargo (WFC 0.62%) -- also got in on the action.
Just how much money could this mean for the bankers that worked on the deal? According to Thomson Reuters' investment banking league tables, there were $2.8 trillion in bonds sold globally through the first half of the year, leading to $11.6 billion in banking fees. So we could say that fees have typically run at around 0.4% of deal value. Do the quick math and you've got the potential for close to $200 million in total fees on just the debt issuance part of the Verizon deal bonanza.
To be fair, the actual fees on the deal probably won't be quite that high -- it's typical that companies are able to negotiate down fee levels on larger deals. But the fees will still be a nice chunk of change.
If you want to think in terms of winners and losers here, JPMorgan and B of A were the two global leaders in bond deal fees through the first half of the year. This will only further solidify their positions. Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, was No. 4 in global bond fees through June, but was nowhere to be found on this mega deal.
