Another year in the books, and it was a huge one for distribution mergers and acquisitions. For most of the year, it was a challenge for our staff to keep up the pace of deal announcements, as most days it seemed like another acquisition items kept popping up in our email inboxes just as we published others.

Our 4Q23 M&A report includes financial benchmarking data and charts provided by investment bank Houlihan Lokey that shows how the pace of of M&A across all industries has slowed considerably since a recent peak in 4Q21. But as discussed in our mid-January MDM Podcast with Brown Gibbons Lang & Company’s Kevin Sargent, distribution M&A outperformed that trend in 2023.

The October-December period of 2023 saw the second and third-most active months of M&A for the year involving distributors, or manufacturers that sell into the distribution channel — with the vast majority of our 400+ M&A news items written last year directly involving distributors. That blew away our counts for 2022 and 2021, and evidenced by what we’ve seen in the first two months of 2024, the current year figures to be another very busy year.

Of course, 2024 is a Presidential election year in the U.S., which carries a reputation of business going conservative on capital spending. The next six months may tell us whether the looming general election date of Nov. 5, 2024 will play a factor into our monthly M&A news item counts this year. Our current guess is that it won’t have a meaningful impact.

MDM Premium members can download 4Q23 M&A Report from here.

Besides our monthly rundown of every M&A item we covered during the October-December period and a full-year breakdown, the report includes M&A financial benchmarks, publicly-traded distributor EBITDA trading multiples and domestic dealmaking trend counts from Houlihan Lokey.

Looking for more M&A insights? MDM’s Feb. 15 webcast tackled the sell-side of the equation with a “ What to Expect When You’re Selling Your Business” panel discussion that included two former distribution owners who recently sold their business, and two executives from investment bank advisory firms. You can watch it free on-demand here.