Essential Utilities, Inc.
WTRGHIGH VELOCITYPRESSURE LEANEssential Utilities, Inc. reads as High Velocity (composite 78/100); pressure / disclosure signals dominate the posture this cycle · primary market Waste, ranked #11 on disclosed spend.
Lens
Disclosed M&A capital (2023–2025)
$103M
vs N/A in 2020–2022
Disclosed transactions
12
3/3 active fiscal years in window
Buyer archetype
Programmatic Roll-Up
High recurring acquisition cadence, usually with many smaller targets.
Composite score
78
High Velocity dominates · Pressure Lean
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
- $300M disclosed buyer spend
- Filed within 18d
Buyer Cadence
Buyer-side companies with recent filing activity
- Filed within 18d
- 184 acquisition-history signals
- 270 8-Ks
Target Probability
Issuers showing target-side patterns from filings
- Control-process language
- 10 activism filings
Spin/Carve
Issuers showing spin-off, carve-out, or sum-of-parts posture
- 10 activism filings
Pressure Watch
Issuers facing activism, governance, or control pressure
- 10 activism filings
- Latest activism 1.5y ago
- Control-process filings
Distress Watch
Issuers showing financial-distress filing patterns
- 10 activism filings
Restatement Risk
Issuers with accounting-integrity flags from filings
Capital Velocity
DominantIssuers with the highest filing-activity intensity
- 270 8-Ks
- Filed within 18d
- 5 form types
Quiet Power
Large issuers with low signal volume and clean disclosure cadence
- Enterprise value $19B
- 10-Q 19d ago
- 2 active signals
Capital cadence.
Ten-year disclosed M&A activity. Bars show spend ($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: $146M · Peak count: 19
| FY | Disclosed buys | Disclosed spend | Avg ticket | Audited tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 3 | $57M | $19M | N/A |
| 2024 | 2 | $700K | $350K | N/A |
| 2023 | 7 | $45M | $6M | N/A |
| 2022 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2021 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2020 | N/A | 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 Expansion25%
- Horizontal Consolidation25%
- Bolt On25%
- Tuck In25%
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
Waste
- Market spend (2023–2025)
- $24.4B
- Market spend (2020–2022)
- $21.3B
- Recent vs prior
- +15%
- Issuer rank in market
- #11 of 38
- Share of market capital
- 0.5%
Valuation positioning
WTRG trades at a -0.2-turn discount to the Waste peer median of 14.4×.
- EV / Revenue
- 7.4×
- Net debt / EBITDA
- 6.2×
- Peer median EV / EBITDA
- 14.4×
Trading comparables
FMP market data · 2026-05-10
| Company | EV / EBITDA | EV / Rev | Net debt / EBITDA | Revenue | M&A 2023–2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15.3× | 5.8× | 3.0× | $679M | N/A | |
| 14.4× | 7.7× | 5.1× | $5.2B | N/A | |
| 14.4× | 7.0× | 3.9× | $199M | N/A | |
Essential Utilities, Inc.WTRG | 14.1× | 7.4× | 6.2× | $2.6B | $103M |
| 13.0× | 4.2× | 5.1× | $1B | N/A | |
H2o AmericaHTO | 12.2× | 4.6× | 5.6× | $816M | $547M |
Trading multiples from FMP market data; disclosed M&A spend from the SE-Cluster EDGAR 10-K corpus. Peer set = top disclosed buyers in Waste. 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)332026-02-26
- 10-Q (quarterly)1002026-05-07
- 8-K (event)2702026-05-08
- Proxy / DEF 14A592026-03-17
- Activism (13D / DFAN / PREC)102024-11-08
Signals on file
- elevated
Activism on file
2024-11-0810 activist filings on file (13D, DFAN14A, PREC14A series).
- info
Signal
Recent transaction activity
- info
Signal
Control-process filings
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.