• Deal succeeds despite market challenges
• Medline’s execution praised for discipline and execution strategy

Medline’s IPO provided a decisive closing act for the 2025 equity capital markets on Wednesday, with the medical products and logistics group pricing a USD 6.3bn offering before jumping roughly 41% in its first day of trading.

The performance offered a late-year verdict on whether public investors were still willing to absorb large sponsor exits after a year shaped by volatility, regulatory disruption and a stop-start issuance calendar.

For market participants, the answer was clearer by the close.

The Illinois-based company pushed through in the final weeks of the year, a point when many had expected issuance to slow materially.

Instead, Medline’s execution and aftermarket pop landed amid a late burst of activity that displayed lingering depth in public markets, even as the calendar narrowed.

“Medline was incredible,” said an ECM managing director (MD). “To launch and price in the last couple of weeks of the year says a lot.”

It was not an isolated transaction. December has seen roughly USD 10bn of equity capital markets issuance in each of its first two weeks, including IPOs and follow-ons, according to the MD. Professional services firm Andersen also debuted today, its shares gaining 47% at open.

The takeaway was clear. “That tells you how deep the market is, even at this point in the calendar,” he said.

That resilience was far from obvious a month earlier. November brought a brief government shutdown alongside heightened volatility, raising questions about whether issuance would slip into early 2026.

Instead, the pullback proved temporary and, in some respects, constructive.

“Coming out of Thanksgiving, the correction helped cleanse positioning and gave investors capacity to re-enter the market,” said an ECM banker.

Issuance that had been sidelined during the shutdown subsequently returned and was absorbed well, the banker said, helping reopen the market for additional transactions.

From a broader perspective, the year-end outcome has surprised even some seasoned market watchers. Will Braeutigam, Deloitte’s US capital markets transactions leader, said 2025 is shaping up as an average to above-average year for IPO proceeds despite extended market closures.

“That’s amazing to me, because the market was essentially shut down for five months,” he said, citing roughly three months in the spring and two months in the fall. “And yet we’re likely going to show an average to an above-average year.”

Braeutigam expects total IPO proceeds to land around USD 42bn–USD 43bn for the year, broadly in line with the long-term average of USD 40bn–USD 42bn, he said.

Against that backdrop, Medline emerged as the clearest test of whether the market could still handle size.

While the IPO calendar remained selective, the ECM banker said the deals that did come were generally digested, with Medline standing apart due to its scale, familiarity and experienced sponsor backing by Hellman & Friedman, Blackstone, and Carlyle.

“Medline is the one investors had been waiting on for the better part of a year and a half,” the ECM banker said, pointing to the company’s long-tenured management team and a sponsor group well known to the buyside. The banker said the strength of the first-day trading reflected follow-through from a broad and high-quality universe of investors.

From an execution standpoint, the pricing was seen as disciplined rather than too aggressive.

Medline priced at USD 29 per share after a modest upsize, a move one source framed as a way to capture incremental demand without pushing valuation to a level that risked destabilising the book.

Allocation structure also appeared to matter for the aftermarket. A source close to Medline said the deal did not appear overly concentrated among a small group of large accounts.

“I don’t think this was one of those deals where most of the allocations went to the top five or ten investors,” the source said. That broader distribution helped support trading once the stock opened. “That’s actually why there’s been some good trading in the secondary market,” the source added.

Still, Medline’s significance stemmed precisely from its size. Had the stock traded poorly, the implications for the broader IPO pipeline would have been immediate.

“If Medline, God forbid, didn’t open well, then what would that have meant for doing large-sized IPOs in early 2026,” the ECM MD said.

Instead, the deal has quickly become a reference point in conversations about how much the market can absorb.

“That’s part of the whole discussion people are starting to have about whether there’s a market for USD 50bn, USD 75bn deals,” the ECM MD said. “Medline becomes a reference point in that context.”

Late-year execution should not be mistaken for a structural shift in risk appetite. Shari Mager, partner and US capital markets readiness leader at KPMG, said some of the December and early January activity reflects backlog created by the government shutdown rather than a change in issuer behaviour.

“What we’re seeing is a little bit of the aftereffects of the shutdown,” Mager said.

Despite the unusual calendar, investor demand remained driven primarily by fundamentals rather than timing, she added. “Investors are focused on the equity story, the metrics and the valuation.”

Medline’s ability to price and trade strongly at scale has helped bring that cycle to a more confident close for sponsor-backed assets, too.

“It’s a statement of success given the size,” the ECM MD said. “When you’re doing something that big, execution really matters.”

A spokesperson for Carlyle said, “Medline is an exceptional business with a best-in-class management team, and we look forward to supporting its next chapter as a public company.” She added that the transaction serves as an important bellwether for the sponsor-backed IPO market and reinforces confidence in the public markets for high-quality businesses.

Medline and Blackstone did not respond to requests for comments. Hellman & Friedman declined to comment.