ICON plc
ICLRACTIVE ACQUIRERQUIETICON plc reads as an Active Acquirer (composite 42/100); Platform Builder deploying $156M across 4 disclosed transactions, down 97% vs the prior cycle · primary market Life Sciences, ranked #10 on disclosed spend.
Lens
Disclosed M&A capital (2023–2025)
$156M
vs $5.9B in 2020–2022
Disclosed transactions
4
2/3 active fiscal years in window
Buyer archetype
Platform Builder
Large and recent disclosed spend expands platforms or service-line scale.
Composite score
42
Active Acquirer dominates · Quiet
Behavioral posture, nine reads.
Each index scores the issuer 0–100 against an EDGAR-anchored definition. Scores ≥ threshold elevate the issuer into the index's constituent set; the dominant index drives the masthead label.
Active Acquirer
DominantCompanies actively deploying disclosed capital into M&A
- $7.8B disclosed buyer spend
Buyer Cadence
Buyer-side companies with recent filing activity
Target Probability
Issuers showing target-side patterns from filings
- Control-process language
Spin/Carve
Issuers showing spin-off, carve-out, or sum-of-parts posture
Pressure Watch
Issuers facing activism, governance, or control pressure
- Control-process filings
Distress Watch
Issuers showing financial-distress filing patterns
- Missing recent 10-Q
- 10-K 459d stale
Restatement Risk
Issuers with accounting-integrity flags from filings
Capital Velocity
Issuers with the highest filing-activity intensity
Quiet Power
Large issuers with low signal volume and clean disclosure cadence
- Enterprise value $12.6B
- 4 active signals
Capital cadence.
Ten-year disclosed M&A activity. Bars show spend ($MM); ticks show recorded transaction count. Disclosure tier annotated where v6 audited corpus carries an entry.
Disclosed spend $MM Disclosed transactions (right axis)Peak spend year: $5,915M · Peak count: 2
| FY | Disclosed buys | Disclosed spend | Avg ticket | Audited tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2024 | 2 | $84M | $42M | N/A |
| 2023 | 2 | $72M | $36M | N/A |
| 2022 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2021 | 1 | $5.9B | $5.9B | N/A |
| 2020 | 2 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Strategy posture.
The buyer's playbook in terms of strategic archetype: what each disclosed move says about how they're deploying capital.
Archetype mix
- Geographic Expansion20%
- Bolt On20%
- Horizontal Consolidation20%
- Platform20%
- Technology Acquisition20%
Strategy keywords
Terms recurring across recent 10-K acquisition disclosures.
- geographic_expansion
- bolt_on
- horizontal_consolidation
- platform
- technology_acquisition
Filing language.
Direct excerpts from acquisition disclosures and strategy sections: the verbs the buyer chose, in the filings they signed.
“We continue to enhance our capabilities through both organic service development and targeted acquisitions to meet the evolving needs of our existing and new clients.”
“In mid-2017 we acquired the Mapi Group, a leading Patient-Centered Health Outcomes Research and Commercialization company.”
“The combined Group has retained the name ICON and brought together approximately 38,000 employees across the globe”
“ICON completed the Acquisition of PRA Health Sciences, Inc. by means of a merger”
“Large pharmaceutical companies are increasingly consolidating their vendor base”
Market context.
Where this issuer sits inside its SE-Cluster rollup wedge, with disclosed-spend rank plus trading comparables against the public peer set.
Primary market
Life Sciences
- Market spend (2023–2025)
- $68.3B
- Market spend (2020–2022)
- $107.5B
- Recent vs prior
- −36%
- Issuer rank in market
- #10 of 155
- Share of market capital
- 1.9%
Valuation positioning
ICLR trades at a -5.4-turn discount to the Life Sciences peer median of 16.1×.
- EV / Revenue
- 1.6×
- Net debt / EBITDA
- 2.4×
- Peer median EV / EBITDA
- 16.1×
Trading comparables
FMP market data · 2026-05-10
| Company | EV / EBITDA | EV / Rev | Net debt / EBITDA | Revenue | M&A 2023–2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19.1× | 4.7× | -0.0× | $45.2B | $10.8B | |
| 18.8× | 4.3× | -0.3× | $20.6B | $8B | |
| 13.3× | 3.5× | -0.1× | $35.5B | $2.2B | |
| 13.1× | 1.9× | -0.2× | $14.1B | $2.1B | |
ICON plcICLR | 10.7× | 1.6× | 2.4× | $8.1B | $156M |
Trading multiples from FMP market data; disclosed M&A spend from the SE-Cluster EDGAR 10-K corpus. Peer set = top disclosed buyers in Life Sciences. Bars scaled to the highest EV/EBITDA in the set.
Target landscape.
Public-issuer targets that fit this buyer's archetype and target categories from filing-derived signal. Scores reflect cross-signal fit; reasons cite the EDGAR-anchored facts that drove the match.
No qualifying public-issuer targets surfaced from the current signal mix.
Stated target categories
No target categories enumerated in the audited corpus for this issuer.
Filing activity & signal stream.
Filing cadence and event-driven signals visible on EDGAR. The signal stream below is curated from restatement / spin-carve / activism categories, providing context for any near-term call.
Filing cadence
- 10-K (annual)262025-02-21
- 10-Q (quarterly)0N/A
- 8-K (event)0N/A
- Proxy / DEF 14A0N/A
- Activism (13D / DFAN / PREC)0N/A
Signals on file
- info
Signal
Serial acquisition history
- info
Signal
10-K strategy themes
- info
Signal
Recent transaction activity
Audited corpus.
No audited record on file for this CIK in the current v6 corpus.
This issuer has not been extracted into the v6 audited acquirer corpus yet. The brief above pulls from ranking-level aggregates and issuer-index signal only.