Where the market is heading: what 698 deals are telling us
Across eight sectors and six months, the same pattern keeps surfacing. Deal flow is accelerating, and almost four in five transactions carry an integration mandate. Here's the signal across the signals.
What you need to know
- We tracked 698 EMEA transactions in six months, and the trend is up sharply — from ~100 a month in winter to 204 in May, a 6-month high.
- 78% (542 of 698) carry a post-acquisition integration mandate — the single most common signal in every sector we cover.
- Momentum is broad: seven of eight sectors grew last quarter, led by Materials & Chemicals (+164%) and FIG (+92%).
- The work is concentrating into the mid-market and the integration window — and forming weeks before any RFP.
Step back from any single sector and the market tells one story. After a flat winter, EMEA deal flow re-accelerated hard into spring — 146 transactions in April, 204 in May — the busiest months in our window by a clear margin. Rising deal volume is the headline; what's underneath it is the more useful signal.
And the momentum isn't concentrated in one place. Seven of the eight sectors we track grew quarter-on-quarter, with the sharpest moves in the smallest, most transition-exposed corners of the market. Only Consumer & Retail cooled.
| Sector | Deals · 6mo | Quarter-on-quarter |
|---|---|---|
| Materials & Chemicals | 40 | ▲ +164% |
| FIG | 114 | ▲ +92% |
| Industrials | 64 | ▲ +56% |
| Business Services | 83 | ▲ +52% |
| Energy & Infrastructure | 71 | ▲ +45% |
| Healthcare | 66 | ▲ +44% |
| TMT | 140 | ▲ +37% |
| Consumer & Retail | 65 | ▼ −19% |
TMT and FIG still carry the most volume, but the fastest-moving stories are elsewhere — battery and transition materials, financial infrastructure, big-ticket industrials. The map of where the deals are isn't the same as the map of where they're growing.
When 78% of deals across eight sectors open the same operating-model window, that's not a sector story. It's where the whole market is going.
Three things the signals are telling us
1. Integration is the work. Across every sector, post-acquisition integration is the dominant pattern — 542 of 698 deals. The market is buying; the advisory demand is in making those acquisitions work.
2. The mid-market is the engine. The mega-deals make the headlines, but the density of mandates sits in the £50m–£1bn range, where buyers are serial acquirers without the in-house capacity to integrate every addition.
3. The transition is re-drawing the map. The steepest growth is in materials, energy and infrastructure — the supply chain and assets of the energy transition — and in the GCC, where sovereign capital and a listings wave are re-platforming whole sectors.
What it means — and how we see it first
The common thread across all of it: none of this arrives as an RFP. It arrives as a filing, a hire, a clearance, a sovereign press release — signals that compound for weeks before procurement catches up. StrategyAI sequences those fragments across thousands of companies and 96+ sources into a ranked, evidence-backed feed, so a partner sees the mandate forming, in their sectors, before the brief exists. Not more data — the next move, with the evidence and a warm route to the buyer attached.
The market signal, right now
Across eight sectors we're currently tracking 698 mandate signals across EMEA — 125 high-conviction, 274 medium, the rest building. The deals are public; the mandates behind them are forming now.
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StrategyAI surfaces the mandates forming across EMEA and the GCC — ranked, evidenced, with a warm route in — before the RFP.