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Behind the Buyouts: Houlihan's Abelow on PE Resilience in 2025

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Published: July 24th, 2025
Justin Abelow, managing director in Houlihan Lokey's financial sponsors group, discusses PE's resilience in navigating a challenging M&A environment and the alternate structures firms are pursuing for liquidity.

On the latest episode of Behind the Buyouts, Justin Abelow, managing director in the financial sponsors group at Houlihan Lokey Inc., discussed private equity’s approach to dealmaking amid a challenging market in 2025.

While M&A hasn’t panned out the way dealmakers expected going into the year, PE remains optimistic and flexible in its pursuit of liquidity.

“The need for [distributions to paid in capital ratio] is at this point pretty well documented,” Abelow said. “When sponsors discover that one company that they perhaps had expected to sell is going to be harder to sell this year, they turn out their pockets and they look for other businesses that are saleable.”

Firms are also turning to other structures such as continuation vehicles and minority sales to return capital to limited partners.

Portfolio companies that don’t have tariff exposure or cyclicality in their business, such as essential and recurring services, are best positioned to transact in 2025 and are seeing strong interest from buyers, Abelow said.

Abelow previously worked for Deutsche Bank AG and JPMorgan & Co. and started his career as a corporate attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. He joined Houlihan Lokey in 2001.

Check out the podcast with Justin Abelow below:

More podcasts from The Deal are available on iTunesSpotify and on TheDeal.com

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