Transport M&A Defies Struggling Market So Far in 2025
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The transportation and logistics sector has experienced a steady increase in merger and acquisition activity during the first half of this year, despite market conditions, according to experts.
This year started off with 250 deals during the first quarter, and then 276 deals in the second quarter, Tenney Group found in its midyear M&A report. The group also noted that the transportation and logistics sector has experienced five consecutive quarters of increased global deal volume, a potential indication of an overall healthier market. A steady 30% increase in deal volumes was recorded across those five quarters.
“Despite a lack of ideal conditions — even though they’re improving — there’s still a tremendous amount of deal volume taking place that was shelved for a couple of periods,” Tenney Group CEO Spencer Tenney said. “You kind of throw it all into a pot of deferred M&A activity that was sidelined due to freight volatility, high interest rates. None of the strategic rationale for doing those deals went away.”
That strategic rationale is the belief that acquisitions continue to offer fleets a way to pursue growth and niche services, even in slower markets. Tenney noted that while buyers have been waiting for business conditions to improve, select companies that view themselves as insulated from market disruptions like tariffs view current conditions as stable enough to encourage deals.
“Where you see extreme uncertainty, that’s where you’re not going to see a high volume of M&A activity,” Tenney said. “For the sectors that have significant exposure to the tariffs — and with that uncertainty — we’re not seeing a lot of deal volume in those categories. Where we’re seeing the deal volume is for the folks that have some type of mode or some insulation, not just from tariffs, but pretty much all disruptors right now. Those companies are being sought out.”
Tenney also says companies are taking a disciplined and patient approach to pursuing deals.
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“We were, I’d say, pleasantly surprised about the level of activity in the market,” said Jonathan Britva, managing director at Republic Partners. “I think everybody was hopeful 2025 was going to be a strong year. I’m not sure it’s going to end up being a super strong year, but it’s certainly been active. We closed four deals in the first half of the year, so we were pretty active in the market, and have a number of other things in the market here in the second half.”
Britva suspects there has been pent-up demand from buyers to get deals done, especially larger firms that have identified a gap in their offerings or a good complementary service. These sorts of buyers often plan out their investments on a longer-term basis, he noted.
Britva has also seen the performance of some companies improve or stabilize, which helps attract buyers.
“The last couple years in this industry have not been overly active in the M&A market, or as least as active as a lot of folks hoped,” Britva said. “With rates being in a long tailspin for quite some time, a lot of transactions that we wanted to get done over that period just couldn’t for a number of reasons.”
Lee A. Clair, a managing partner at Transportation and Logistics Advisors, said access to capital also hindered the market in recent years. “It originally crashed — whenever it is, about 2½ years ago — because of changes in the debt market, and there was no money available. You couldn’t borrow money, and then the overall fundamentals of the trucking market went down the tubes.”
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Notably, Clair pointed out that fleet earnings have also been slower to rebound than many expected, keeping market conditions at a low level.
“There are niches that are doing well and it’s because their earnings have held up,” Clair said. “Anything related to medical has been doing reasonably well. There’s been people running final-mile businesses, depending what sectors they’re in and what they do, some of those have done very well.”
Clair added, “Things tend to go up and down, month to month, but in total, it’s not a big change over the last two years.”
