Lehman Brothers, a top Wall Street firm, is launching an investment banking unit in India this year, joining a host of competitors expanding in a fast-growing market for deals like mergers and IPOs.
Lehman, which worked on the first wave of overseas Indian listings in the mid-1990s, is moving in the same direction as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in a country where the economy is growing at more than 8 percent a year.
"We're setting up investment banking now ... people will be on the ground this year," Charles Alexander, Lehman's head of Asia corporate finance in Hong Kong, told Reuters. "It's one of the big opportunities our senior management sees globally."