Blackstone touts record 2025 results and signals IPO window is reopening

Blackstone Inc. closed out 2025 with what its top executives called the strongest performance in the firm’s four-decade history, posting record distributable earnings, record inflows of new money and nearly $1.3 trillion in assets under management.

The world’s largest alternative asset manager is now preparing to push a slate of portfolio companies toward public markets, arguing that an initial public offering window that had been largely shut for much of the past two years is reopening.

“Blackstone just reported the best results in our forty-year history, with distributable earnings of $1.75 per share,” President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Gray told analysts on a Thursday earnings call. He said the quarter capped “a record year for the firm” on earnings and fundraising and coincided with “one of the largest IPO pipelines in our history.”

The results and comments offer a snapshot of how private markets are emerging from a period of slow deal-making and constrained exits. They also highlight the growing weight of a handful of asset managers that now sit at the center of global credit, real estate and infrastructure finance. Yet the firm’s shares fell on the day of the report, underscoring investor doubts about how long the boom can last and how safely it can be managed.

Record earnings, inflows and assets

Blackstone reported distributable earnings of $2.2 billion, or $1.75 per common share, for the quarter ended Dec. 31, up slightly from a year earlier and above Wall Street expectations. For 2025 as a whole, distributable earnings rose about 20% to $7.1 billion, or $5.57 a share.

Assets under management climbed 13% to $1.2749 trillion. Fee-earning assets reached $921.7 billion, while perpetual capital—long-duration or open-ended funds that are harder for investors to redeem—grew to $523.6 billion, nearly half of fee-earning assets.

Fundraising was brisk. Blackstone took in $71.5 billion of new capital in the fourth quarter, its strongest quarter for inflows in more than three years, and $239.4 billion for the full year. The firm deployed $42.2 billion in the quarter and $138.2 billion in 2025, and realized $46.1 billion of exits in the three months to December and $125.6 billion for the year.

Undrawn capital commitments—money investors have promised that has not yet been invested—stood at $198.3 billion at year-end. Executives repeatedly referred to that figure as “nearly $200 billion of dry powder,” positioning it as a competitive advantage if deal activity continues to pick up.

“Our focus on investing at massive scale in the build-out of digital and energy infrastructure continues to create significant value for our investors,” Chairman and Chief Executive Stephen Schwarzman said in a statement accompanying the results.

Infrastructure and credit lead performance

Those infrastructure and credit businesses were among the biggest contributors to performance. Blackstone’s dedicated infrastructure platform, which includes data centers, energy and transportation assets, grew its assets under management roughly 40% over the year to $77 billion. The firm said its infrastructure funds appreciated 8.4% in the fourth quarter and about 24% in 2025, with data center operator QTS singled out as a major driver.

Credit and insurance assets rose to about $520 billion, up 15% from a year earlier. Gray said more than $140 billion flowed into credit and insurance strategies in 2025 from institutional investors, private wealth clients and insurance companies.

Blackstone emphasized the resilience of its private credit book amid broader scrutiny of nonbank lenders. The firm reported that non-investment-grade private credit strategies delivered roughly 11% gross returns last year and that realized losses in its global direct-lending portfolio, which exceeds $160 billion, were 0.11% over the past 12 months.

“We continue to see very strong credit performance,” Gray said, adding that many borrowers had benefited from “conservative underwriting and strong cash-flow characteristics.”

Real estate stabilizes; BREIT sees improved flows

Real estate, which has been a weak spot across much of the industry as higher interest rates hit valuations, showed modest improvement. Blackstone said its private real estate values rose about 1% in the fourth quarter and 1.5% for the year but remained approximately 16% below their peak levels from before the rate shock. The firm contrasted that with a sharp rise in public equities over the same period.

Blackstone’s nontraded real estate investment trust for wealthy individuals, known as BREIT, generated an 8.1% net return in 2025, nearly three times the return of public real estate investment trust indexes. The vehicle suffered heavy redemption requests in 2022 and 2023 that forced it to limit withdrawals, drawing attention from regulators and politicians. Executives said December 2025 brought BREIT its best net flows in three years, helped by a promotional program offering bonus shares to longer-term investors.

Across its global equity real estate holdings, Blackstone said roughly 75% of assets are now concentrated in data centers, logistics and rental housing. The firm argues that limited new construction in U.S. logistics and multifamily housing—which it says is at the lowest levels in more than a decade—will support occupancy and rent growth in the coming years.

Private equity gains and a push toward IPO exits

Corporate private equity funds gained about 5% in value in the fourth quarter and 14% for the year, supported by high single-digit revenue growth and stable margins across portfolio companies, according to the firm.

The earnings report also shed more light on Blackstone’s efforts to monetize some of those portfolio companies through public listings.

In December, medical products supplier Medline Industries completed an initial public offering that raised more than $6.2 billion, selling shares at $29 each. The stock surged roughly 40% on its first day of trading, giving the company a market value that financial publications estimated at between $50 billion and $54 billion. It was the largest U.S. IPO since 2021 and, by several accounts, the largest sponsor-backed IPO on record.

Gray told investors that global IPO issuance rose about 40% year over year in the fourth quarter, with activity in the United States roughly two and a half times higher than a year earlier. “We were a major contributor with the Medline IPO, the largest sponsor-backed IPO in history,” he said.

Blackstone, along with Carlyle Group and Hellman & Friedman, acquired a majority stake in Medline in 2021 in a deal valued between $30 billion and $34 billion, at the time described as the largest leveraged buyout in the health care sector. The private equity owners did not sell shares in the public offering, using the proceeds instead to pay down Medline’s debt.

Schwarzman called Medline “a perfect illustration of the power of Blackstone’s private equity model,” citing expansion initiatives and acquisitions undertaken while the company was privately held.

The firm now plans to bring other household names to market. In late 2024, Blackstone agreed to buy a majority stake in sandwich chain Jersey Mike’s Subs at a valuation of about $8 billion and closed the deal in January 2025. The restaurant group, which has more than 3,000 locations in the United States and Canada, is now being prepared for a potential listing, according to people familiar with the matter and recent financial press reports.

Blackstone also owns Copeland, the former climate technologies unit of Emerson Electric Co. The firm initially led a $14 billion deal for 60% of the business and agreed in 2024 to acquire Emerson’s remaining 40% stake for $3.5 billion. Bloomberg reported last year that Blackstone had selected banks to work on a Copeland IPO that could launch as soon as 2026.

“We have one of the largest IPO pipelines in our history, reflecting a diverse mix of sectors and geographies,” Gray said on the call, highlighting expected activity in the United States and India.

For Blackstone and its peers, successful listings are crucial to turning years of paper gains into cash that can be distributed to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and other clients—and to unlocking performance fees known as carried interest. Blackstone ended the year with $6.7 billion in net accrued performance revenues, the firm said, a pool of potential future income that depends largely on exit markets staying open.

Investor doubts and rising regulatory scrutiny

Despite the upbeat tone, investors reacted cautiously. Blackstone’s shares fell roughly 3% on Thursday and remain about a quarter below highs reached in September, according to market data and financial news reports. Analysts and investors have cited concerns about the sustainability of rapid growth in private credit, lingering questions over real estate valuations and the possibility that the current level of earnings represents a cyclical peak.

The firm is not alone in facing those questions. Other large alternative asset managers, including Apollo Global Management and KKR & Co., have also expanded aggressively into private credit and insurance in recent years. Data compiled by the Financial Times show the 10 biggest private equity firms accounted for nearly half of U.S. fundraising in 2025, up from roughly a third the year before, intensifying debate about concentration of risk and influence in private markets.

Regulators in the United States and Europe have signaled increased interest in the growth of nonbank lending and the role of private investment funds in areas such as housing and infrastructure. Blackstone has sought to reassure policymakers and clients by pointing to low loss rates in its credit business, conservative leverage at portfolio companies and its structure as an asset manager that does not take on insurance liabilities.

For now, the firm is leaning on its scale and fundraising clout to argue that it can navigate those pressures while continuing to deploy capital into what it sees as long-term themes, from data centers and power grids to rental housing and industrials.

Whether forthcoming offerings such as Jersey Mike’s and Copeland can match the reception that greeted Medline, and whether Blackstone can maintain low loss rates as its lending book grows, will help determine if 2025 marks a high-water mark for the industry or the start of a new phase in private markets’ expansion.