Private equity: IPO pipeline swells to bursting point

The weak performance of several recent IPOs is casting a shadow on one of the market’s most fertile sources of dealflow: private equity firms. Private equity sponsors have leapt at the recent opportunity to exit investments via IPOs with robust enthusiasm, with, as Deutsche Bank’s Henrik Johnsson, European head of high-yield capital markets, told this magazine in April “every single private equity asset that has been owned for more than one year looking at an IPO”.