General Motors (NYSE: GM) has agreed to sell Opel/Vauxhall, its European business, to French carmaker PSA Group (EPA: UG) for €2.2 billion, a deal that will consolidate the owner of Peugeot’s position in Europe and lead to GM’s exit from the continent.
The transaction also comes with an interesting corollary: BNP Paribas Personal Finance will join PSA in a 50/50 joint venture to buy GM’s European financial operations for €900 million, representing a 0.8x multiple on the unit’s €1.2 billion book value at the end of 2016.
From PSA’s perspective, the addition of Opel/Vauxhall and its €17.7 billion in 2016 revenue will give the company a 17% market share. But BNP Paribas (EPA: BNP) emerges as the big winner from the deal, as the French bank is now able to consolidate the GM financing unit’s €9.6 billion in existing loans and 1,800 European dealerships with its existing auto loans business, which includes leasing unit Arval and insurance division Cardif.
But where does BNP Paribas stack up against other acquisitive investment banks operating in Europe?
The bank’s hardly been an active acquirer of late. The acquisition of Opel/Vauxhall’s financing operations represents its first deal since the 2015 pickup of the fund administration arm of Credit Suisse, per the PitchBook Platform. But with a flurry of activity in the five years before that, BNP Paribas still finds itself in a lofty place on this list of the most acquisitive investment banks in the European M&A space since the start of 2010:
BNP Paribas
From an advisory perspective, BNP Paribas clocked time on 49 deals last year, per PitchBook’s 2016 Annual Global League Tables. That’s good for sixth-most in Europe behind the likes of Deloitte, Lazard and Goldman Sachs.
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Article by Adam Putz, PitchBook
