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US private equity pioneer Carlyle Group says performance in its flagship buyout business has stabilised after taking a handful of investments public, restoring investor confidence after a turbulent period.
John Redett, co-president of Carlyle and head of its $164bn-in-assets buyout unit, said the group’s focus on exiting investments in recent years has paid off after it used a reopening of markets for public offerings to exit businesses in the US and Asia and return billions of dollars in cash to investors.
“The deal teams have done an excellent job turning the business around,” Redett said in an interview with the FT.
“We made a very focused effort on our investments and we were very clear to our investors that monetisations were coming,” he added. Redett highlighted the group’s US private equity unit, which in December took medical supplies company Medline public in a $7.2bn initial public offering, the largest of a PE-backed company.
Carlyle, founded in 1992, is widely considered one of the pioneers of the $4tn private equity industry. Over the past decade it has lagged behind larger rivals such as Blackstone, KKR and Apollo Global in terms of growth as a failed leadership succession and some misfired PE bets have worried investors.
Carlyle’s business was rocked in 2022 by the surprise resignation of chief executive Kewsong Lee, which caused fundraising for its latest flagship fund to stall and ultimately fall billions of dollars short of a $20bn-plus target. Though some investors baulked because of the management turmoil, the company also was hit by some large investment losses such as the bankruptcy of supermarket supplier Acosta in 2020.
In 2023, the group fell well short of a $22bn fundraising target for its eighth flagship buyout fund. But Carlyle’s fortunes began to recover after hiring Harvey Schwartz, a former top Goldman Sachs executive, as chief executive that year.
Under Schwartz, Redett and other top executives, Carlyle realigned its PE business, shedding investment teams focused on consumer deals and changing leadership at its struggling European buyout business.
It also redoubled efforts to exit deals and return cash to investors to prove it maintained strong dealmaking operations in core areas including aerospace and defence, healthcare, industrial takeovers and in regions such as Japan and China where it has recorded large windfalls.
In 2025, Carlyle’s PE unit sold down $18bn of assets using a mixture of IPOs and sales to strategic buyers. The asset sales helped the company report better than expected fourth-quarter earnings on Friday, leading to a 6 per cent gain in its share price. They have risen more than 10 per cent over the past year, in contrast with slides at competitors Apollo, Blackstone and KKR.
In addition to Medline, it took aviation parts supplier StandardAero public in 2024 and sold additional shares last year, a deal credited with reopening IPO markets to PE-owned companies after a long freeze. It also took public two businesses in Japan, brewery Orion and analytics firm Rigaku, and IT consultancy Hexaware in India.
The IPOs have led to an increase in returns at Carlyle’s two flagship US buyout funds and a Japanese buyout fund it raised in 2020, according to public filings.
“We were able to deliver $18bn of monetisations in our global PE business in a market that had some fairly material events like ‘liberation day’ [Donald Trump’s term for launch of extra tariffs] and the government shutdown,” said Redett, who added the group has sold a further $7bn in deals this year.