Blackstone lines up huge IPO pipeline

0:02Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, January 30th. This is your FT News Briefing. Looks like lots of people put iPhones on their Christmas lists, and Blackstone is ready for a whole lot of initial public offerings. Plus, we'll drill down on the changes in the oil industry and how it's impacting Canada. I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

0:34Apple reported record revenue last quarter, about$144 billion. That was thanks to a surge in iPhone purchases during the holiday season. Sales in China also gave the company a big boost. A successful launch of the iPhone 17 helped push revenue up by 23 % year-on-year. that blew past the company's already ambitious targets. Strong hardware sales have helped soothe investor anxiety over Apple's AI strategy. It's had some false starts and rivals are poaching the company's top talent. Apple shares are up 22 % over the past six months. They were also up in after hours trading yesterday.

1:17Blackstone has lined up one of its largest IPO pipelines in history. That's what its president, Jonathan Gray, told the Financial Times. He spoke to my colleague, Antoine Gara, who joins me now. Hi, Antoine. Hi, how are you? I'm doing well. So Antoine, just to remind folks, Blackstone is the world's largest private capital group. What kind of deals does it have lined up? So yeah, John Gray told me that they've really got what could be the largest pipeline of companies in their portfolio that they're going to be taking public in the coming months or year. And that really started last year with the$7.2 billion IPO of Medline Industries, medical supplies giant.

2:01That IPO has traded really well. And optimism at Blackstone is high that the IPO market is really receptive to a lot of its portfolio companies. So I've talked to sources who have told me that there's a pipeline of other companies that are coming, including Jersey Mike's, a U.S. sandwich chain that it bought a few years ago. And then this company Copeland, which has done very well. And it's sort of in the refrigeration and cooling and HVAC marketplace. And it's really a way for it to start returning cash to its investors. Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about why Blackstone is starting to float these companies now.

2:42Yeah, what Gray told me in the interview was he compared it to the 2013-2014 timeframe, which was about five years after the financial crisis, and markets had healed a lot, and people were excited about IPOs again. And the same thing seems applicable here. Interest rates went up really quickly in 2022. It scared a lot of people. IPO markets have been closed for a number of years. But now they're opening up, and that's now created a window to take sort of non-buzzy tech businesses, real kind of companies, public, and actually find a demand among shareholders. Okay, so there are ideal market conditions that are playing into this.

3:25You mentioned that the IPO markets are starting to open up. How much of a change is this for the private capital industry? We've been watching these IPOs as a referendum for the private capital industry. Medline, in my eyes, was the real question, could the largest PE firms start exiting their big deals, or would a growing stockpile of aging deals just continue to grow and grow and grow? And that would sort of throw the private capital ecosystem into kind of a stall because if investors aren't getting their money back on deals, they're less likely to fund new investments. But, you know, the fact that Medline priced strongly, it traded well, was a really strong sign.

4:09And the fact that there are more IPOs coming is another good data point. So the wheels are starting to turn for private capital and all the money is going back to their investors. And then, of course, it's going to come right back into the ecosystem on new deals. Yeah, I want to talk about that ecosystem a little bit. I mean, what does it mean for the broader equities market that has been doing so well lately that all these shares are going to be coming on board? I think it's really interesting because Medline, again, a healthcare medical supplies company, that's very sort of old economy. It's not an AI stock.

4:47It's not Microsoft. It's not NVIDIA. They're much more about sort of profits and profitability and strong cash flows. all these things that aren't really top of mind for tech investors. And so it seems like there's been a real bid for ordinary companies that are more traditional as a way to sort of diversify from big tech, which has been really the only game in town in U.S. equity markets for about a decade. I see it as a sign of sort of healing in the overall equity market and that there is demand outside of just these super fast-growing high-valuation tech companies. That's the FT's Antoine Gara.

5:27Thanks so much, Antoine. Thank you.

5:35We have talked a lot this week about how geopolitics is affecting many corners of the market. Currencies, stocks, metals. What we haven't talked about yet is oil. But Victoria Craig, our Monday news briefing host, has come prepared for our weekly chat. Hi, Victoria. Hey, Mark. So we saw a rally in oil prices yesterday. What was going on? So the international Brent crude benchmark broke above$70 a barrel to a five-month high yesterday. And that was off the back of President Trump's escalating threats against Iran. The U.S. has been building up a military presence in the Middle East. You talked yesterday with Steph Chavez about that.

6:15Yeah, the beautiful Armada, as he described it. Exactly. That is raising concerns about any supply disruptions that could happen as a result of any direct U.S. military action in Iran. Okay, so that's one geopolitical event moving markets. The other that has kind of been put on the back burner for the past couple of weeks is Venezuela. But we could hear about it again today, right? Yeah, so the big U.S. oil companies are going to report their quarterly earnings bright and early in America today. And the focus is less on how they performed in the last part of last year and more on what they're going to have to say about whether they're preparing to invest in, or in Chevron's case, invest more in Venezuela.

6:54And now, just to remind folks, the United States is exerting control over Venezuela's crude oil supplies and has already sold some on the global market. You had a really interesting chat with our colleague Jamie Smith about how that's having an unexpected positive impact on the Canadian oil industry. Yeah, there was a thought that when that comes on the market, it would undermine crude exports from America's northern neighbor. But Jamie told me why that hasn't happened. So the concern was that if Venezuela's oil starts flowing into the Gulf Coast, this is going to really push out some of the Canadian oil.

7:35It could potentially be imported at a cheaper price under this new deal with the US. But it doesn't seem to be coming to pass. You know, there's still a lot of political and investment uncertainty around what's going to happen in Venezuela. It's been estimated that it's going to cost about$100 billion to boost production in Venezuela, and that it's going to take quite a long time, up to 10 years. That means that Canadian producers are somewhat insulated from that. Just about 10 % of this heavy crude is actually refined on the Gulf Coast. The rest actually is currently refined in the Midwest or West Coast refineries.

8:17It's sort of tougher to get Venezuelan crude there. So I think for these two reasons, investors are thinking Canadian crude is still in a pretty good position. Where is Canada seeing the biggest demand for its oil coming from? Well, the U.S. is by far the largest customer for Canadian crude. But we've seen a very interesting shift in the last two years. We're beginning to see that Canada's exporting a lot more of its crude. and you've seen that China has really become a key export market now. So exports to China have quadrupled and new data shows that about 16 % of Canadian crude is now flowing to alternative markets from the US.

9:03So I think very much the idea is that Canada wants to keep its options open. This actually can have a good benefit in terms of the discount that Canadian crude is sold at. A barrel of Canadian crude sells for, you know, typically up to$15 less than the light sweet crude that the U.S. produces. Jamie, you mentioned the U.S., and I think it's an interesting contrast, the fortunes for Canada's oil producers and America's shale patch, because the American producers have been struggling with low oil prices. For Canada, is it a one-two punch of longevity that you've been talking about and reliability that's sort of driving this divergence?

9:46I think so. What we've seen on the U.S. shale patch is the break-even prices are quite high. The average is up to$60 or$55 for certain projects. So it's hard to invest in that environment. Shale is a very short-term investment cycle. The wells turn around very quickly, whereas oil sands are a different beast entirely. There it requires a huge upfront capital investment to start with but then these projects last for decades and I think that has given investors a bit more confidence in the Canadian producers at the minute and actually this recognition that the energy transition away from fossil fuels is going to take a lot longer than what we originally felt just a few years ago that benefits these oil sands producers in a big way.

10:36Well, that was some really interesting stuff from Jamie and Victoria. You'll be back with more news on Monday morning. Thank you so much. Thanks, Mark. You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back next week for the latest business news. The FT News Briefing was produced this week by Claire Williamson, Julia Webster, Sonia Hudson, Fiona Simon, and Victoria Craig. I'm your host and editor, Mark Filipino. Our show is mixed by Alex Higgins and Kelly Gary. We had editorial help this week from Peter Barber, Michael Lello, David DaSilva, and Gavin Kallman.

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