Jefferies Group Lures Morgan Stanley’s Lipacis to Cover Chips
March 31, 2011, 10:28 AM EDTBy Laura Marcinek
March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Jefferies Group Inc. hired Mark Lipacis from Morgan Stanley to cover the semiconductor industry as the firm adds analysts and bankers to challenge larger Wall Street rivals, according to a person with knowledge of the move.
Lipacis will be based in Jefferies’ San Francisco office, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the hiring isn’t public yet. Lipacis is on 90-day leave from Morgan Stanley, the person said. Both firms are based in New York.
In his previous job at Prudential Equity Group, Lipacis was one of the first analysts to predict that new products from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. would take market share from Intel Corp. and damage the larger company’s profit in 2006. Intel sales slumped 9 percent that year and profit fell 42 percent.
Jefferies is luring talent from Wall Street competitors to boost equity trading and win a bigger share of mergers and acquisitions. The staff increased 17 percent to 3,084 employees in the 11 months through Nov. 30, primarily at the fixed-income and investment-banking businesses.
Equity trading revenue grew 1.8 percent to $177.4 million in the quarter ended Feb. 28 from $174.3 million in the three months ended March 31 last year. The firm ranks as the 16th most-active adviser in deals this year, up from 24th in all of 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Tom Tarrant, a Jefferies spokesman, said he wasn’t allowed to comment, citing the firm’s policy. Sandra Hernandez, a spokeswoman for New York-based Morgan Stanley, declined to comment. A message left for Lipacis at his Morgan Stanley office wasn’t immediately returned.
--With assistance from Ian King in San Francisco and Michael Moore in New York. Editors: Rick Green, Peter Eichenbaum
To contact the reporter on this story: Laura Marcinek in New York at lmarcinek3@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.
