An analysis of 3,919 SEC EDGAR filings affecting US manufacturers between January 2020 and April 23, 2026. Q1 2026 working draft.
The post-COVID cycle has three phases. Pandemic shock and opportunistic buying (2020-2021). Fed rate-hike-driven distress wave (2022-2024). New expansion as rate cuts and reshoring tailwinds compound (2025-2026).
Five US states account for 38 percent of all detected manufacturing M&A activity. The story within each state differs dramatically.
Chemicals dominates and it is not close. Lumber and printing show closure and bankruptcy rates that indicate structural decline, not cyclical stress.
Five primary-source-verified deals from the most recent extension of the dataset. Each citation resolves to an SEC filing or court-appointed claims-agent docket index.
BOMForge runs a detection pipeline against SEC EDGAR's full-text search API. Thirteen query patterns cover acquisitions, beneficial-ownership filings, and bankruptcy disclosures. Every filing from an entity with a manufacturing SIC code (2000 through 3999) is classified, entity-resolved against BOMForge's index of the American industrial base, and tagged by sector, geography, and transaction type.
This dataset captures transactions by publicly traded manufacturers that file 8-Ks with the SEC. The real PE serial acquirers (Platinum Equity, American Industrial Partners, Arcline Investment, One Rock Capital) operate through private portfolio companies with no SEC filing obligation. Total PE manufacturing deal volume is estimated at two to four times the detected count. Closing this gap requires wire-service RSS feeds and PE-firm portfolio-page crawling, both queued for the next edition.
This v2 (May 19, 2026) is a working-draft revision of the April 23 release. The revision pass added inline primary-source citations, applied 17 factual corrections, demoted 4 claims to BOMForge analysis with methodology disclosure, and cut 4 claims for lack of primary source. Further corrections are expected. Do not cite this data.