Fastenal Co.
FASTHIGH VELOCITYFILING INTENSITYFastenal Co. reads as an High Velocity (composite 78/100); Selective Buyer deploying $0 across 0 disclosed transactions, running flat vs the prior cycle · primary market Industrial Services.
Lens
Disclosed M&A capital (2023–2025)
N/A
vs N/A in 2020–2022
Disclosed transactions
N/A
0/3 active fiscal years in window
Buyer archetype
Selective Buyer
Acquisition use is visible but targeted.
Composite score
78
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
- $61M disclosed buyer spend
- Filed within 27d
Buyer Cadence
Buyer-side companies with recent filing activity
- Filed within 27d
- 2 acquisition-history signals
- 279 8-Ks
Target Probability
Issuers showing target-side patterns from filings
Spin/Carve
Issuers showing spin-off, carve-out, or sum-of-parts posture
Pressure Watch
Issuers facing activism, governance, or control pressure
Distress Watch
Issuers showing financial-distress filing patterns
Restatement Risk
Issuers with accounting-integrity flags from filings
Capital Velocity
DominantIssuers with the highest filing-activity intensity
- 279 8-Ks
- Filed within 27d
- 4 form types
Quiet Power
Large issuers with low signal volume and clean disclosure cadence
- Enterprise value $50.8B
- 10-Q 40d ago
- 2 active signals
Capital cadence.
Ten-year disclosed M&A activity. Bars show spend ($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: $61M · Peak count: 1
| FY | Disclosed buys | Disclosed spend | Avg ticket | Audited tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2024 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2023 | N/A | N/A | N/A | 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
- Horizontal Consolidation50%
- Geographic Expansion50%
Strategy keywords
Terms recurring across recent 10-K acquisition disclosures.
- geographic_expansion
- horizontal_consolidation
Filing language.
Direct excerpts from acquisition disclosures and strategy sections: the verbs the buyer chose, in the filings they signed.
“Our stores represent the foundation of our service approach, putting us close to the customer and providing an efficient means of providing them with a broad range of products and services on a timely basis.”
“The industrial, construction, and maintenance supply industry, although slowly consolidating, still remains a large, fragmented, and highly competitive industry.”
“Branches were entirely U.S.-based until 1994, when we opened our first location in Canada followed by opening our first branch location in Mexico in 2001.”
“Since Fastenal's founding and through 2013, branch openings were a primary growth driver for us, peaking in 2013 at 2,687 locations.”
“Traditional and international branches sell to multiple customers. In each year since 2013, we have experienced a net decline in our total branch count, primarily due to consolidations in our U.S. market, including net declines of 86 branches in 2023. Our total decline since 2013 is 1,090 branches. We will continue to open traditional and international branches in accordance with our overall strategy. We believe the strategic rationalization that has produced a significant decline in our traditional branch network in the United States and Canada since 2013 is largely completed, and expect reduced closing activity beginning in 2024.”
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
FAST trades at a +9.6-turn premium to the Industrial Services peer median of 18.6×.
- EV / Revenue
- 6.0×
- Net debt / EBITDA
- -0.1×
- Peer median EV / EBITDA
- 18.6×
Trading comparables
FMP market data · 2026-05-10
| Company | EV / EBITDA | EV / Rev | Net debt / EBITDA | Revenue | M&A 2023–2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Fastenal Co.FAST | 28.2× | 6.0× | -0.1× | $8.4B | N/A |
| 21.0× | 4.7× | 1.4× | $18.2B | $14M | |
| 20.5× | 3.8× | 2.6× | $23.9B | $1.6B | |
| 16.6× | 3.6× | 2.1× | $19.6B | N/A | |
Pool CorporationPOOL | 13.2× | 1.6× | 1.9× | $5.4B | $27M |
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.
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)302026-02-05
- 10-Q (quarterly)972026-04-16
- 8-K (event)2792026-04-29
- Proxy / DEF 14A362026-02-25
- Activism (13D / DFAN / PREC)0N/A
Signals on file
- info
Signal
Disclosed acquisition spend
- 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.