이 기사는 2020년 05월 25일 08:00 thebell 에 표출된 기사입니다.

NH Investment & Securities is making little progress in advising cross-border mergers and acquisition (M&A) deals despite its partnership with a global investment bank.

NH Investment & Securities joined hands with Evercore, a global boutique M&A advisory firm, to boost its global competitiveness in 2016. The two companies signed a strategic alliance agreement to work together on cross-border investments of businesses at home and abroad by discovering M&A opportunities, exchanging market information and offering advice for their clients together.

Before that, Woori Investment & Securities made a cooperation agreement with Evercore Group and Evercore Group’s Brazilian subsidiary G5 Holding in 2011 in a bid to expand its investment banking (IB) business to North and South America. NH Investment & Securities was formed by a merger of Woori Investment & Securities and Nonghyup Securities in 2014.

Unlike the non-binding cooperation agreement, the strategic alliance agreement made in 2016 is a legally-binding contract. NH Investment & Securities and Evercore also agreed to share profits when they jointly provide advisory services. The Korean brokerage firm sent two employees to New York after making the strategic alliance.

An IB industry source said that expectations for the improvement in NH Investment & Securities’ cross-border deal capacity were high just because it joined hands with Evercore. Ralph Schlosstein, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Evercore, co-founded the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock in 1988. He spent about 20 years in BlackRock and has served as Evercore CEO since 2009.

Yet, the number of cross-border deals that NH Investment & Securities has advised on since its strategic alliance with Evercore stands at zero. Their alliance has lost its meaning especially after Evercore made its name in the domestic market when the U.S.-based firm advised Samsung Electronics in the acquisition of American automotive technology company Harman in 2016.

Recently, NH Investment & Securities has hired an M&A advisory specialist in a move to strengthen its presence in the lucrative M&A advisory market.

The brokerage firm announced on May 4 that it has appointed Jason Lee to lead its M&A advisory team. Prior to joining NH Investment & Securities, he worked for Belgian chemical company Solvay as head of strategy development.

The firm also has made a structural change to elevate the team to a specialized business department directly belonging to one of two divisions at the top of the organizational hierarchy within its investment banking unit.

(Reporting by Byung-yoon Kim)