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发信人: Porod (扬之水◎Love in One Day), 信区: English
标题: Make or break?
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Tue Apr 24 09:46:11 2007), 转信

Apr 23rd 2007
From Economist.com
The fate of ABN AMRO

Reuters

ABN AMRO, the Dutch bank that not so long ago was considered one of the uglier
ducklings of the banking industry, is not short of suitors. On Monday April
23rd Barclays, a big British bank, agreed to pay €67 billion ($91.2 billion
) in a deal that will create Europe’s second-largest bank. Talks between
the two were given fresh impetus last week by the emergence of a trio of
rivals, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Santander of Spain and the Dutch-Belgian
group, Fortis. They could yet launch a hostile bid which would see the Dutch
national champion carved up between them.

The outcome could provide the answer to how Europe’s other leading banks
should proceed as the EU continues to press for a single market in banks
and finance. So will better banks result from the creation of ever larger
and more diverse conglomerates? Or should governments and regulators swallow
hard and oversee a wholesale demolition of a few of their wards in the hope
that something stronger emerges from the rubble?

ABN AMRO is a good test. If the Dutch outfit adds its hodge-podge of commercial
outfits to that of Barclays this would create a vast bank with gamut of
retail and investment banking interests. But Barclays also needs help with
the substantial dowry and Bank of America has agreed to pay $21 billion
for LaSalle, the Dutch bank’s Chicago-based subsidiary. Even so, sticking
with Barclays seems the best bet, at least for ABN AMRO’s management. And
other deals could quickly follow. Last week’s rumours that Italy’s UniCredit
had its eye on France’s Société Générale have been firmly quashed but
a bidding battle with BNP Paribas is still a possibility.

A sale to Barclays will please Dutch regulators—the central bank is set
against the break up of a national champion. And Barclays has already made
various concessions to keep the Dutch central bank happy such as switching
the merged bank’s headquarters to the Netherlands. The top jobs will also
be filled by familiar faces. John Varley, Barclays’ chief executive, will
take the helm of the new bank; Arthur Martinez, ABN AMRO’s current chairman
, will keep his title. But some 13,000 lesser folk will face the chop and
Rijkman Groenink, ABN AMRO’s chief executive and long the target of shareholder
ire, will be shunted into a non-executive role.

If the rival consortium wins a bidding battle, a break-up is inevitable.
Each bank hopes to snap up parts of ABN AMRO that best fit their existing
businesses. So RBS would take LaSalle Bank and ABN AMRO’s investment bank
. Santander would buy businesses in Brazil and Italy. Fortis would get the
Dutch operations.

On paper this makes sense. Analysts reckon that the trio would each pay as
much as €25 billion for their share. Not small change, but more manageable
than the sum Barclays is coughing up. Integration, too, could be simpler
because the three banks are already expert in the bits they would buy. Moreover
, RBS and Santander are skilled at meshing together companies whereas Barclays
is not known as a savvy integrator.

So would a merger with Barclays result in a bigger and more integrated universal
bank—or merely a bigger one? Barclays retorts that ABN AMRO’s woes are
a result of its failure to knit its disparate parts together. Barclays itself
has been streamlining its operations—exactly the kind of work that would
be needed at ABN AMRO. But making a big bank that peddles a wide range of
dissimilar products to dissimilar customers across many dissimilar countries
is hard—as other universal banks, such as Citigroup, have found.

Still, staying narrow and domestic is a shrinking option when home markets
are mature and saturated. One reason that Mr Varley, Barclays’s boss, is
so keen on a tie-up with ABN AMRO is that it would help the predominantly
British retail bank leap out of its slow-growth home market and open up
new ones for its successful investment bank. But bigger is not necessarily
better—and it certainly is not easier.
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困境有一种特殊的科学价值，有智慧的人是不会放弃这个通过它而进行学习的机会的。　

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