Covid-19 forced a tectonic shift in how we work and where we work. With more people working from home, many companies took this opportunity, while already disrupted, to relocate their corporate headquarters.

A common sentiment heard on zoom calls, “The home office approach is working better than we expected. Maybe we don’t really need an office downtown.”

“Maybe we don’t need to be in this state,” was the reply.

Consequently, some firms relocated.

Anecdotal conversations around the M&A community suggest a lot of firms left New York and moved to Florida, Texas and Colorado. But what does the data show?

We compared the headquarter locations of private equity firms in our M&A Research Database in January 2000 to March 2021. The chart below shows the migrations of private equity firms over the past 15 months, by state.

Private equity investments in apparel companies has declined in recent years, although this trend is not too dissimilar from PE investment trends overall.

The graph below shows private equity platform investments in Apparel companies over the past 5 years.

The trending private equity investment sectors for February 2021 are highlighted below with a few example transactions.

Food supplement businesses are attracting attention from private equity investors. PE firms have already made six platform investments in the supplement space in 2021.

In fact, our M&A Research Database shows 180 supplement businesses currently held as portfolio companies of private equity firms.

The “supplements” category represents a diverse range of businesses. The 180 private equity owned supplements companies include:

I thought it would be interesting to look at the trends in private equity platform acquisitions year-by-year, since 2000. The graphs below represent 47,394 private equity platform acquisitions over the last 21 years.

We can clearly see the dip in new acquisitions during the dot.com bust (2001 – 2003), the last recession (2009), the skittishness of 2019 (Q4 mostly), and the pandemic of 2020.

The trending private equity investment sectors for January 2021 are highlighted below with a few example transactions.

As we reported in our year-end review: Top 10 Industries for PE Platform Investments in 2020, Software was the #1 industry of interest for private equity firms in 2020, as a percentage of all PE platform acquisitions.

The graphs below show the steep increase in private equity acquisitions in both Software and SaaS companies.

While private equity firms acquired considerably fewer companies in 2020, PE investments in healthcare, as a percentage of total PE platform acquisitions, increased significantly in 2020, now pushing 9% of total PE platform acquisitions.

The trending private equity investment sectors for December 2020 are highlighted below with a few example transactions.

Private equity firms are increasingly interested in scalable companies with lower CapEx requirements. Consequently, private equity acquisitions of manufacturing companies has steadily declined as a percentage of the total number of private equity platform investments.