Andreas Neubauer & team Deutsche Bank
The buy side says: “They have real experts, and they know absolutely everyone.”
Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt-based team takes top honors for a remarkable 15th consecutive year. The 20 analysts, economists and strategists directed by Andreas Neubauer, 46, produce research that is “much more in-depth than their peers’ and always back up their statements with statistical data,” according to one buy-side backer. The team upgraded the preferred shares of Volkswagen from hold to buy in July, at €80.99, because “we were impressed by the strong cash generation and saw strategic problems like the [light-commercial vehicles] business getting fixed,” Neubauer reports. By the end of the year, shares of the Wolfsburg-based automaker had raced to €121.40, a gain of 49.9 percent that sped past the broad German market by 36.4 percentage points. Another winning recommendation: a March upgrade from hold to buy on Adva Optical Networking, at €2.90, on the belief that the Martinsried-based telecommunications-equipment company was ideally situated to benefit from growth in bandwidth expansion and metro fiber networks spurred by surging mobile data traffic and growing interest in cloud computing. By late December the stock had rocketed 102.1 percent, to €5.86.
