Top 25 Industries for Private Equity Portfolio Acquisitions – 2018

We reviewed all private equity platform portfolio company acquisitions in 2018 and categorized them by industry. The chart below shows the top 25 industries of interest for private equity.

Four industries stand out, representing nearly a third of all PE deals:

1. Healthcare
2. Software
3. Manufacturing
4. Business Services

Note – these percentages do not exactly match the percentages we have previously reported because the industry categories are broken out differently. For example, “Software” is a sub-category of “Technology”, but they are broken out separately here. So, while we previously showed that Technology represented ~12% of PE deals in 2018, we report here ~8% for Software and ~4% for (other) Technology in the chart above.

Another example – some of the portfolio companies classified as “Consumer Products” might in fact be “manufacturers of consumer products”. In these cases, the portfolio company is classified as “Consumer Products” and not “Manufacturing”. The Manufacturing category is therefore understated in the chart above. We did this because we did not want to double count a portfolio company in the analysis.

In cases like these, we opted to classify to the more specific industry (i.e. Software is more specific than Technology).