Partnered Research: IPEM Pan-European Private Equity Survey 2025

GPs are cautiously optimistic as we enter 2025. Fundraising challenges, constrained capital deployment, and limited opportunities to exit investments are business as usual, while attempts to boost fundraising and ease liquidity pressures through wealth investors and alternative fund structures are only growing in importance.

That optimism also comes despite the second Trump administration putting trade wars to the top of the external threats list, concerns over poor economic growth in Europe, and 40% of GPs fearing a major correction. A slim majority of our industry—51%—still expects the global business environment to be on the up in 2025.

This is the picture emerging from the 2025 IPEM pan-European Private Equity survey, analyzed by AlixPartners in collaboration with the team at IPEM. In total, 158 responses were received for the seventh annual edition of the survey organized by the CSA Institute on behalf of IPEM, working with 14 European national PE associations.

Download the full report or scan the findings below.

Survey methodology

This pan-European annual PE survey, organized by IPEM since 2018, is designed to gauge the mood of European GPs for the year to come. As well as capturing views on the economic, business and regulatory climate, this year’s survey explores views on the wealth revolution democratizing private equity investment.

The 47-question online survey was completed by a sample of 158 European fund managers, from November 27 to December 16, 2024, via a link shared by IPEM and each partner association. A statistical adjustment was applied on the number of GPs in Europe by geographical region to create the best representative gauge of European PE sentiment possible.