(Bloomberg) -- Wall Street kicked off the 2025 IPO market with a flurry of paperwork paving the way for some of the year’s biggest potential deals.
The latest came Monday, when Smithfield Foods Inc. filed for an initial public offering. An IPO for the world’s largest pork producer, acquired by a Chinese company in 2013, may raise $1 billion or more, Bloomberg News reported earlier.
Several others snuck in before the 2024 calendar flipped over, such as Venture Global Inc. — one of the biggest suppliers of liquefied natural gas in the US — whose IPO could raise more than $3 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.
Also in late December, medical supplies firm Medline Inc. and fintech startup Chime Financial Inc. submitted key paperwork with US regulators for potentially sizable first-time share sales.
Including those mentioned here, at least nine companies targeting IPOs in 2025 may each raise $1 billion or more for a total of around $18 billion, Bloomberg News has reported. More firms could pile in if the market proves welcoming.
Bankers have predicted a more active year for listings — so long as President-elect Donald Trump’s policy threats stay out of the way — as markets expect modest reductions in interest rates and private equity firms look to break the logjam and sell stakes in companies they’ve invested in.
Still, the sheer size of companies weighing IPOs — Chime, CoreWeave, and Genesys Cloud Services Inc. were each worth more than $20 billion in recent deals — will test the amount of dry powder investors have stocked up.
In the past three years, 10 deals raised more than $1 billion on US exchanges. That compares to an average of 15 annually in the decade prior, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“There is a lot of pent up demand, but the question is with so many companies that need to go to market, where will the buyers be in terms of valuation,” said Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTV Capital.
The performance of closely-watched names like Venture Global, CoreWeave and Klarna Group Plc will be critical. While last year’s US IPO volume was subdued by historical standards, the performance of new companies mostly rewarded investors. Companies that raised more than $150 million in US IPOs rose some 38% from their offer price on average, beating a 23% rise for the S&P 500 Index, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Even as 2024 volume jumped more than 60% versus 2023, US IPOs are still recovering from a streak of interest-rate hikes. There was $43 billion raised via US first-time share sales in 2024, still below the average seen across the decade prior to the pandemic, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.