Jeffrey Sine is starting all over again … kinda.
After building Morgan Stanley Dean Witter’s Global Media and Telecommunications investment banking business from scratch into the dominant deal-maker on Wall Street, Mr. Sine has agreed to jump to UBS Warburg, where he has been asked to do the same thing all over again.
By the last week in March, Mr. Sine will join UBS Warburg in the new post of global head of technology, media and telecom investment banking. He will be a managing director and a vice chairman of the investment banking department. Just this year, Mr. Sine was named global co-head of Morgan Stanley’s combined media and communications investment banking group.
Since joining Morgan Stanley in 1986 and taking over as global head of media investment banking in 1991, Mr. Sine has grown it into a $300 billion deal-making powerhouse. Morgan Stanley was ranked No. 1 again last year with 66.4 percent of the market share and 36 announced media deals valued at $300 billion. He acted as an adviser to Time Warner in its merger with America Online, and he represented Viacom in its merger with CBS, and Seagram in its merger with Vivendi Universal.
“This is what I did 10 years ago at Morgan Stanley,” Mr. Sine told Electronic Media. “Times are different now, and it is important to take the integrated approach to building telecom, technology and media businesses. There is a lot going on.”
“The downturn in the capital markets has created opportunities in merger and acquisitions. The volatility and change in the markets will create a whole new set of opportunities, particularly in cable, the restructuring of emerging telecom and the continuation of divestitures and acquisitions in all of these sectors,” Mr. Sine said.
Although UBS Warburg is a business group of UBS AG, one of the largest financial services firms in the world, it has been more instrumental in media deals outside the United States. In this country, UBS Warburg’s securities activities are conducted through UBS Warburg LLC and PaineWebber, which it acquired last year. Veteran analyst Christopher Dixon heads UBS’s entertainment and new media research operations.