Serial acquirers: why 10% of buyers make 56% of all acquisitions

If you run a sale process or bid for a target, you are rarely competing against a random set of buyers. Our analysis of around 500,000 acquirers and more than 1.6 million recorded acquisitions shows that a small group of serial acquirers accounts for the majority of deal activity worldwide.

This article breaks down the concentration data from our industry report M&A as a System, explains what distinguishes systematic acquirers from opportunistic ones, and shows how deal teams can use this knowledge before the next process starts.

This article covers one chapter. The full report also looks at the role of financial investors, the geographic hotspots of M&A, the outlook for next year and the assessments of six M&A experts. For more insights, download the report M&A as a System here for free.

In this article you'll learn:

• Why your next bidding process will likely include an experienced serial acquirer
• How to tell a systematic buyer from a one-off buyer in your market
• Why acquisition experience is a strong indicator of future deal activity
• How a simple watchlist helps you spot buyer activity before attractive targets are gone

How concentrated is M&A activity?

Ranking all acquirers by their number of acquisitions makes the concentration visible immediately. The top 1% of acquirers account for nearly a quarter of all recorded acquisitions, the top 2% for around a third, and the top 10% for 56%. In absolute terms, more than 900,000 acquisitions were completed by roughly 50,000 companies.

The opposite perspective is just as clear. Looking at how often each company acquires, 62% of all acquirers have completed exactly one acquisition, 28% have completed two to five, and only 10% have acquired six or more companies.

Nearly two thirds of acquirers never appear as a buyer again after their first deal. That is an observation, not a judgment. For many companies, using M&A selectively is the right call. The real question is whether low acquisition activity is a deliberate decision, or whether M&A has simply never been assessed systematically as a growth option.

What separates systematic from opportunistic acquirers

Deal count alone does not show whether M&A is part of a company's strategy. The report therefore classifies a company as a strategic acquirer if it completes more than two acquisitions within five years. That translates into a threshold of 0.4 acquisitions per year relative to company age. By this definition, only 8% of acquirers buy strategically, while 92% act opportunistically.

External research points in the same direction. In their NBER working paper Is There Information in Corporate Acquisition Plans?, Gokkaya, Liu and Stulz classify 74.64% of the acquisition plans they examine as opportunistic and only 25.36% as based on an internal pipeline. Their sample consists exclusively of listed companies, which tend to have dedicated Corporate Development teams, so a higher share of systematic acquirers is to be expected there.

Systematic M&A is not a question of corporate tradition. Strategic acquirers are younger on average, but considerably larger. The size effect likely works in both directions: larger companies have more resources for continuous M&A, and a systematic acquisition strategy itself contributes to faster growth.

“M&A is not an event, but a capability. And capabilities improve through repetition.” Daniel Funk, CEO & Co-Founder, CVT Partner

The experts we interviewed add an important caveat: transaction frequency shows who acquires regularly, not necessarily who acquires strategically. Daniel Funk frames the test as ex ante versus ex post. Is the deal derived from the strategy, or is the strategy retrofitted to justify the deal?

Why active acquirers stay active

The more acquisitions a company has completed, the more likely it was also active as a buyer within the past two years.

M&A experience behaves less like the outcome of a completed project and more like an organizational capability: once built, it gets used again. The flip side matters just as much. The gap does not close on its own. Companies that have not acquired for years do not build M&A routines just because market conditions improve.

Why do so many companies stop after one deal? Dirk Sachse, Managing Partner at CFN Corporate Finance Nord, sees the main hurdle after closing: “In my view, the fear that the integration will fail is even greater than the concern about broken-deal costs.”

What this means for your next deal

If you enter a bidding process, you will likely face buyers who have run comparable processes many times, with established workflows and well-practiced decision-making, and who started building their pipeline long before the sale process began. The report recommends a simple countermeasure: maintain a watchlist of the most active acquirers in your segment.

• Scope: the 15 to 20 companies that completed the most acquisitions in your core segment over the past 24 months
• Data points: acquisition frequency, typical target size (revenue or EBITDA) and preferred region or submarket
• Cadence: update quarterly, so you see activity in your target segment before an attractive target has been acquired, not afterwards

Maintained manually, this list means checking dozens of sources every quarter. With a continuously updated global acquisition database, the same overview takes minutes instead of days and stays current automatically.

Get the full industry report

This article covers one chapter. The full report also looks at the role of financial investors, the geographic hotspots of M&A, the outlook for next year and the assessments of six M&A experts. For more insights, download the report M&A as a System here for free.

Want to know who the most active acquirers in your segment are? Book a demo and see StrategyBridgeAI live with your own use case.