33,000 SMEs for sale: what the data reveals about the market

A market without reliable data

Every year, tens of thousands of owner-managers reach retirement age. Many have built their company over twenty, thirty or forty years. Some SMEs generate several million euros in turnover, employ dozens of staff, have a long-standing customer portfolio, and yet their transfer remains difficult.

The paradox is this: this fragmented, opaque and very poorly documented market has no single, reliable source for knowing how many companies are actually for sale, in which sectors, at what valuation levels, or for what reasons.

When we set out to build our analysis tools, we ran into this reality. So we decided to build the database we were missing ourselves.

How this database was built

For more than a year, we collected, deduplicated, normalised and enriched data from multiple sources: business-sale marketplaces, brokers, M&A firms, owner-manager networks, local platforms, private listings, public financial data and open sources.

The normalisation work focused on three points: sector coding, to make heterogeneous labels comparable, the matching of duplicates across sources, and the actual age of each listing, which is often missing or reset with every republication.

What these figures do not say. A listing is not a company that is actually for sale: some are old, others have been withdrawn without being deleted. The aggregated amounts are asking prices, not transaction prices, and the gap between the two is precisely one of the subjects of our analyses. Finally, sales negotiated privately, without any listing, by construction escape this database: they represent a significant share of the real market.

What the analysis reveals

A fragmented and opaque market. A significant share of companies in transfer remain poorly structured, or not at all: incomplete information, no clear view of actual profitability, strong dependence on the owner-manager, partial documentation, or business models that are hard for a buyer to read.

A significant share of listings is old. Many companies have been for sale for months, sometimes years, without any buyout solution emerging. This is not only a price problem, it is a problem of structuring and readability.

The available information is rarely comparable. The same sector, the same company size, the same level of profitability can appear in radically different formats depending on the source. Without normalisation, no economic reading is possible.

Certain sectors come up recurrently: business services, maintenance, specialised industry, transport, industrial cleaning, healthcare, technical distribution, engineering and services to local authorities. These are often low-visibility activities, rarely covered by the media, but essential to the functioning of the real economy. What they have in common: they almost always rest on know-how and an organisation built over time, and they transfer badly when these are not documented.

A human subject first and foremost

The most important lesson of this work is not financial. An SME transfer is almost never a simple transaction. Behind every file there is an owner-manager who built their company over several decades, teams whose future depends on the buyout, customers and suppliers established over the long term, and a local area whose activity depends in part on this continuity.

This is why price is not the only decision criterion. Many sellers attach real importance to the continuity of the business, the protection of employees, the preservation of know-how, and the way the company will be taken over and run. These elements are rarely present in listings. Yet they are decisive in the outcome of a transaction.

What we are making accessible

We have opened up part of this database: volumes by sector, orders of magnitude for asking valuations, geographical distribution and age of listings. The aim is to give an owner-manager, a buyer or an intermediary a first reading grid for a market that offered none.

Data will never replace people in an SME transfer. But it makes the market more fluid, more transparent and more efficient: identifying transferable companies earlier, spotting sector dynamics, structuring files upstream, and reducing the time between the decision to sell and the actual buyout.