Lazard Considers Initial Public Offering
Lazard, the world’s largest investment banking partnership, is considering an initial public stock offering and has held discussions with five investment banks about a share sale, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday.
An IPO would value the bank, headed by Bruce Wasserstein, 56, at about $3 billion, the people said. The company, run from New York, London and Paris, met bankers from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, UBS, Citigroup Inc. and Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., they said.
Wasserstein joined Lazard in 2001 and has hired bankers such as Gary Parr, formerly Morgan Stanley’s mergers-and-acquisitions chief, to revive the firm’s business of selling takeover advice. That left less money to pay dividends to nonworking partners and their families, led by Chairman Michel David-Weill, 71, who ceded control of the firm to Wasserstein as a condition of his employment, people familiar with the matter said in March.
“Wasserstein has a long-term view of building a franchise that lives on after him,” said Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, who covers securities firms.
“This has to be about gaining permanent capital.”
An initial share sale by Lazard, founded in 1848 in New Orleans as a dry goods company, may be the largest by an investment bank since Goldman’s $3.65 billion IPO in 1998.
