2026 has produced some striking M&A headlines: global deal value near record highs, driven by AI infrastructure and a run of very large transactions, even as the total number of deals has fallen to one of its lowest points in a decade. For anyone building a mid-market bolt-on programme, that combination is close to meaningless on its own, and taken at face value it can point you the wrong way entirely.
What the 2026 numbers are actually showing
carrying almost the entire headline figure, while broad-based deal volume stays subdued. Below that headline, though, two things are true at once. Private equity sponsors are sitting on very large amounts of uncommitted capital, and that pressure is expected to push more mid-market and bolt-on activity through the rest of 2026, not less. Cross-border interest into resilient mid-sized businesses, particularly in the UK and Europe, remains strong on both the strategic and financial-buyer side.
There’s a second pattern worth noting. Prepared buyers, the ones who know exactly what they’re looking for and can move on it, are pulling further ahead of buyers still in wait-and-see mode. In a more selective market, having a thesis and a plan to act on it is worth more than it used to be.
Why proactive origination matters more in this kind of market
run process puts you in the same room as every other bidder, competing on price against buyers who may have deeper pockets or fewer questions. A target found and profiled before any formal process starts is worth more precisely because nobody else is bidding on it yet. That’s the point of target identification: it doesn’t wait for a deal to come to market. It starts from your acquisition thesis and builds a screened shortlist of companies that fit it, whether or not anyone has thought about selling them yet.
What separates a usable shortlist from a padded one
- Criteria agreed and defended before screening began, not loosened afterwards to justify a longer list
- The researcher paid for the exercise itself, not for the deal that follows, so nothing gets nudged toward the easiest target over the right one
- Each name backed by ownership and contactability intelligence, not just a filtered spreadsheet
- Local judgement from people who know the market, not desk research alone
- A shortlist sized to be worked through, eight to twelve names, not padded fo
A target found and profiled before any formal process starts is worth more precisely because nobody else is bidding on it yet.
Buying the plant instead of building one
A US mid-market manufacturer wanted a genuine foothold in Asian production and distribution, but the organic route looked like years of site selection, licensing, hiring and supplier relationships built from nothing. Rather than start from zero, the company reframed its Asian expansion as a bolt-on acquisition brief: find an established Indian manufacturer in an adjacent product category, with existing plant capacity, a working distribution network and export experience, that a US buyer could realistically acquire and integrate. Working from that thesis, we mapped the Indian manufacturing universe against agreed criteria, screened out businesses that didn’t genuinely fit, and delivered a shortlist of ten profiled targets within eight weeks of the brief, each rated on strategic fit, ownership structure and contactability. The corporate development team moved straight
This example is anonymised in keeping with our client confidentiality agreement
Where this usually goes wrong
Buyers commissioning target identification for the first time sometimes expect it to double as a banker pitch or a due-diligence pack. It’s neither. It’s the step that comes before both of those, the work that decides which targets are worth the time either would cost. Skip it, and a corporate development team’s first real picture of a market ends up shaped by whichever targets happen to be for sale, not the ones that actually fit the thesis.
