Articles

By Brandon Mack

The M&A Source and the International Business Brokers Association recently updated their survey results for the second quarter of 2016; the report included 378 respondents. In the last part of this series, we will analyze how the types of businesses that make up the market have changed since the first quarter.

For businesses sold for under $500 thousand, not that many statistics have changed. Consumer goods did grow from 10% to 13%, while wholesale distribution dropped from 6% to 2%. Restaurants are still the most common at 25%.

For the next bracket of businesses ($500 thousand to $1 million), the entire landscape has been reshuffled. In this group of businesses, 17% of the businesses sold were businesses services (previously 10%), 13% were personal services (previously 16%), 11% were restaurants (previously 5%), and 10% were consumer goods (previously 10%).

In the final bracket of businesses sold between $1 and $2 million, the landscape has changed as well. In this group, manufacturing has grown from 14% to 22%, personal services has grown from 11% to 15%, wholesale has grown from 4% to 15%, and construction has dropped from 19% to 12%.

While the market has changed this quarter, the change is not concerning. Part of it is the normal ebb and flow of transactions from quarter to quarter, coupled with the lower number of businesses sold for over $500 thousand, which means the percentages can vary from quarter to quarter more than those less than $500 thousand. It will be interesting to see if the third quarter results will continue the trend or revert to previous levels.