Eaton Vance is about to shell out $53 million in cash for Calvert, and one of the most prominent Wall Street analysts watching asset management still likes the deal.

William Katz Citigroup Analyst

Bill Katz, Jack Keeler, and Ryan Bailey of Citi stuck with their "favorable initial take" on the deal after Eaton Vance [profile] CEO Tom Faust and Calvert [profile] CEO John Streur explained the deal on a conference call with the Citi folks and other analysts. That call also revealed the $53-million cash pricetag for the deal, which amounts to 0.43 percent of Calvert's $12.3 billion in AUM.

Barron's reported on Katz's fresh take on the deal. Faust unveiled the deal Friday morning before the conference call, and he talked with MFWire about the deal.

Katz and his Citi colleagues like the deal because they like the "quite modest price" (asset managers often sell for one to three percent of AUM) and because they expect "significant cost saves" from moving Calvert from its own infrastructure onto Eaton Vance's in many areas. And the Citi folks see ESG (or "responsible investing," as the Calvert folks call it) as being a notable area of industry growth, despite Calvert's recent woes, and Eaton Vance has the distribution to take advantage of that ESG growth. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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