THE Eastern Company
EMLHIGH VELOCITYFILING INTENSITYTHE Eastern Company reads as High Velocity (composite 62/100); pressure / disclosure signals dominate the posture this cycle · primary market Industrial Services.
Lens
Disclosed M&A capital (2023–2025)
$421M
vs $7M in 2020–2022
Disclosed transactions
1
2/3 active fiscal years in window
Buyer archetype
Consistent Strategic Buyer
Meaningful spend appears across repeat years.
Composite score
62
High Velocity dominates · Filing Intensity
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
Companies actively deploying disclosed capital into M&A
- $708M disclosed buyer spend
Buyer Cadence
Buyer-side companies with recent filing activity
- 219 8-Ks
Target Probability
Issuers showing target-side patterns from filings
- 36 activism filings
Spin/Carve
Issuers showing spin-off, carve-out, or sum-of-parts posture
- 36 activism filings
Pressure Watch
Issuers facing activism, governance, or control pressure
- 36 activism filings
- Latest activism 1.8y ago
Distress Watch
Issuers showing financial-distress filing patterns
- 10-Q 249d stale
- 36 activism filings
Restatement Risk
Issuers with accounting-integrity flags from filings
Capital Velocity
DominantIssuers with the highest filing-activity intensity
- 219 8-Ks
- 5 form types
Quiet Power
Large issuers with low signal volume and clean disclosure cadence
- Enterprise value $180M
- 10-Q 249d ago
- 2 active signals
Capital cadence.
Ten-year disclosed M&A activity. Bars show spend ($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: $421M · Peak count: 1
| FY | Disclosed buys | Disclosed spend | Avg ticket | Audited tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | N/A | $421M | N/A | N/A |
| 2024 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2023 | 1 | $400K | $400K | N/A |
| 2022 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2021 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2020 | 1 | $7M | $7M | 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
- Bolt On50%
- Technology Acquisition50%
Strategy keywords
Terms recurring across recent 10-K acquisition disclosures.
- bolt_on
- technology_acquisition
Filing language.
Direct excerpts from acquisition disclosures and strategy sections: the verbs the buyer chose, in the filings they signed.
“Our results of operations and cash flows have been and may in the future be adversely impacted by (i) the failure of acquired businesses to meet or exceed expected returns, which could result in the imposition of impairment charges related to goodwill or assets of the acquired business;”
“We also regularly review our operations and results to identify businesses that no longer fit within our core capabilities, offerings, and markets and that we may determine to divest.”
“the success of any such acquisitions depends on our ability to combine the acquired business with our existing business”
“We regularly review our portfolio of businesses and pursue growth through acquisitions.”
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
Industrial Services
- Market spend (2023–2025)
- $65.5B
- Market spend (2020–2022)
- $39.6B
- Recent vs prior
- +65%
- Issuer rank in market
- N/A
- Share of market capital
- 0.0%
Valuation positioning
EML trades at a -0.6-turn discount to the Industrial Services peer median of 11.4×.
- EV / Revenue
- 0.7×
- Net debt / EBITDA
- 1.6×
- Peer median EV / EBITDA
- 11.4×
Trading comparables
FMP market data · 2026-05-10
| Company | EV / EBITDA | EV / Rev | Net debt / EBITDA | Revenue | M&A 2023–2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15.1× | 1.0× | -0.4× | $24.2B | $444M | |
Paychex, Inc.PAYX | 13.1× | 5.8× | 1.1× | $6.3B | $3.2B |
| 11.4× | 0.9× | 7.8× | $2.5B | $3.9B | |
| 11.3× | 4.5× | 0.2× | $16.4B | $931M | |
THE Eastern CompanyEML | 10.8× | 0.7× | 1.6× | $246M | $421M |
AZZ Inc.AZZ | 8.7× | 3.0× | 0.8× | $1.7B | $1.3B |
Trading multiples from FMP market data; disclosed M&A spend from the SE-Cluster EDGAR 10-K corpus. Peer set = top disclosed buyers in Industrial Services. Bars scaled to the highest EV/EBITDA in the set.
Buyer landscape.
Public buyers whose stated archetypes, target categories, and recent cadence align with this issuer as a plausible acquisition target. Scores cross EDGAR signal and disclosure overlap.
Likely buyers
No public buyers surface as a strong target-side fit on current signal.
Likely sellers / divestiture partners
No reciprocal divestiture / strategic-alternatives matches identified.
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)352026-03-19
- 10-Q (quarterly)942025-11-04
- 8-K (event)2192026-05-08
- Proxy / DEF 14A822026-03-23
- Activism (13D / DFAN / PREC)362024-09-20
Signals on file
- elevated
Activism on file
2024-09-2036 activist filings on file (13D, DFAN14A, PREC14A series).
- info
Signal
Serial acquisition history
- info
Signal
10-K strategy themes
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.