Costco Wholesale Corp.
COSTHIGH VELOCITYFILING INTENSITYCostco Wholesale Corp. reads as an High Velocity (composite 70/100); Selective Buyer deploying $0 across 0 disclosed transactions, down 100% vs the prior cycle · primary market Consumer Products.
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
70
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
- $1.2B disclosed buyer spend
Buyer Cadence
Buyer-side companies with recent filing activity
- Filed within 55d
- 265 8-Ks
Target Probability
Issuers showing target-side patterns from filings
- 6 activism filings
Spin/Carve
Issuers showing spin-off, carve-out, or sum-of-parts posture
- 6 activism filings
Pressure Watch
Issuers facing activism, governance, or control pressure
- 6 activism filings
- Latest activism 30y ago; heavily discounted
Distress Watch
Issuers showing financial-distress filing patterns
- 6 activism filings
Restatement Risk
Issuers with accounting-integrity flags from filings
Capital Velocity
DominantIssuers with the highest filing-activity intensity
- 265 8-Ks
- 5 form types
Quiet Power
Large issuers with low signal volume and clean disclosure cadence
- Enterprise value $438.4B
- 10-Q 90d ago
- 1 active signals
Capital cadence.
Ten-year disclosed M&A activity. Bars show spend ($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: $1,163M · 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 | 1 | $1.2B | $1.2B | N/A |
Filing language.
Direct excerpts from acquisition disclosures and strategy sections: the verbs the buyer chose, in the filings they signed.
“Generating comparable sales growth is foremost a question of making available to our members the right merchandise at the right prices, a skill that we believe we have repeatedly demonstrated over the long term.”
“At the end of 2016, our warehouses contained approximately 103.2 million square feet of operating floor space: 73.3 million in the U.S.; 12.6 million in Canada; and 17.3 million in Other International locations.”
“At the end of fiscal 2017, our warehouses contained approximately 107.3 million square feet of operating floor space: 75.4 million in the U.S.; 13.5 million in Canada; and 18.4 million in Other International.”
“We buy most of our merchandise directly from manufacturers and route it to cross-docking consolidation points (depots) or directly to our warehouses.”
“We believe that the most important driver of our profitability is sales growth, particularly comparable sales growth.”
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
Consumer Products
- Market spend (2023–2025)
- $145.2B
- Market spend (2020–2022)
- $102.1B
- Recent vs prior
- +42%
- Issuer rank in market
- N/A
- Share of market capital
- 0.0%
Valuation positioning
COST trades at a +19.0-turn premium to the Consumer Products peer median of 12.2×.
- EV / Revenue
- 1.5×
- Net debt / EBITDA
- -1.2×
- Peer median EV / EBITDA
- 12.2×
Trading comparables
FMP market data · 2026-05-10
| Company | EV / EBITDA | EV / Rev | Net debt / EBITDA | Revenue | M&A 2023–2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Costco Wholesale Corp.COST | 31.2× | 1.5× | -1.2× | $286.3B | N/A |
| 15.7× | 2.3× | 2.0× | $164.7B | $24.6B | |
| 8.7× | 1.3× | -0.1× | $10B | $5.5B |
Trading multiples from FMP market data; disclosed M&A spend from the SE-Cluster EDGAR 10-K corpus. Peer set = top disclosed buyers in Consumer Products. 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)322025-10-08
- 10-Q (quarterly)1022026-03-11
- 8-K (event)2652026-04-15
- Proxy / DEF 14A492025-12-04
- Activism (13D / DFAN / PREC)61996-07-18
Signals on file
- elevated
Activism on file
1996-07-186 activist filings on file (13D, DFAN14A, PREC14A series).
- info
Signal
Serial acquisition history
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.