North America Equity House: Goldman Sachs
Heating up In a close tussle with its main rivals, Goldman Sachs led the largest primary equity capital raise for a US company, as well as some of the year’s hottest IPOs and creative transactions for the market’s most sophisticated clients. Goldman Sachs is IFR’s North America Equity House of the Year.
The annual race for top US ECM honours was again a tight affair, but Goldman Sachs set itself apart from its closest rivals, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, with its lead role in executing the year’s most consequential equity financing.
In October, Boeing chose Goldman to exclusively run a weekend wall-crossing exercise that shored up its US$24.25bn common stock and mandatory convertible preferred offering.
The bank led the 20-firm syndicate to complete the biggest primary capital raise ever by a US company.
The offering was one of the few things that have gone right for the struggling aircraft maker in recent years.
Boeing raised more than the market initially expected while 33,000 of its workers were on strike and safety questions lingered over its planes. More to the point, the offering succeeded in transforming market perceptions of Boeing’s balance sheet strength and turnaround prospects.
Goldman didn’t dominate the league tables as much as it has in some years but the bank’s role on Boeing meant it clearly held down the top spot for ECM proceeds based on which firm took the coveted lead-left bookrunner role.
Notably, Goldman was able to achieve that without banking the crypto sector, a significant source of fees for Wall Street in the last few months of 2024.
“The market looks to the lead-left,” said David Ludwig, Goldman’s US-based global head of ECM. “When [an investor] doesn’t get their allocation, they are yelling at our team. They’re not yelling at [another bank].
“If Boeing didn’t go well, they would be upset with us [rather than other banks] but when it did go well, they were actually very happy with Goldman Sachs from a franchise perspective.”
Under the leadership of Ludwig, Elizabeth Reed, global head of syndicate, and Gabe Gelman, head of Americas ECM, Goldman was a bookrunner on most of the year’s big IPOs as the tech sector and sponsor-backed offerings staged a measured comeback.
In the case of BrightSpring Health, Ibotta, Kindercare Learning, Rubrik and UL Solutions, Goldman was the first bank named in the syndicate.
In the twilight of 2024, Goldman Sachs also led arguably the hottest IPO of the year, the US$718.5m Nasdaq IPO of ServiceTitan. The tradespeople-focused software provider was one of only three debuts in 2024 from the once-prolific software sector, though its robust 45% gain as of the end of the year pointed to greater activity levels in 2025.
“When someone really wants one bank to lead a transaction, they ask Goldman Sachs to lead that business,” Ludwig said.
On the follow-on front, Goldman’s biggest lead-left mandate other than Boeing was the sale of Johnson & Johnson’s remaining 9.5% stake in consumer health products maker Kenvue for US$3.65bn in May, about a year after carving out the business and taking it public.
Goldman also flexed its balance sheet muscle when needed, most notably in late July to price a US$2.7bn block of shares in Nasdaq on behalf of selling shareholder Thoma Bravo. The offering priced at a higher mark and tighter discount than a US$1.6bn block led by one of its rivals in March.
Not everything big that Goldman did shows up in league tables.
Goldman was also behind one of the year’s most novel transactions when it and Morgan Stanley raised US$4.12bn from two private placements for logistics billionaire Brad Jacobs’ QXO, a cashbox that plans to consolidate the building products industry. Jacobs put in US$1bn of his own money to give the vehicle more than US$5bn of cash to pursue its ambitions.
More in tune with 2024’s strongest investment theme, Goldman was also sole placement agent for a US$700m private placement by Nasdaq-listed Nebius, an AI infrastructure/cloud services firm that is deploying Nvidia GPU clusters.
“There’s creative ways to give our clients options outside of just using the regular-way capital markets to achieve their objectives,” Ludwig said.
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