In its 2026 M&A Report, Bain & Company argues that oil and gas companies that constantly look for merger and acquisition opportunities generate much higher shareholder returns than their less active peers.

“The difference in total shareholder returns for frequent acquirers was 57% higher than inactive companies between 2000 and 2010. That jumped to 130% between 2012 and 2022,” the firm calculates.

Bain defines “frequent acquirers” as companies that engage in at least one deal a year. “These serial acquirers offer invaluable lessons in how to sharpen M&A skills,” it says. “They devote particular attention to two key areas: taking a more aggressive approach to finding deals and creating more value by strategically using deals as a catalyst for broad-scale transformation.”

As part of that more aggressive approach to M&A, Bain says these companies map the players in their market and evaluate potential combinations ahead of time.

“The serial M&A acquirers maintain a running list of their top (typically 15 to 20) targets. They use outside-in diligence and systematically create a deal thesis and detailed financial model for each potential deal, updating that view as market conditions change,” Bain relates.

When they identify a good fit, the serial acquirers initiate conversations instead of waiting for assets to come on the market, Bain continues. “We know several situations in which a CEO-to-CEO meeting initiated by the eventual acquirer ultimately led to the deal, which happened outside a formal investment banking-led bake-off. In our view, oil and gas executives who aren’t knocking on the doors of private equity-owned companies are missing opportunities,” it says.

Bain recommends using AI to improve diligence. “Competition for deals is going up, and deal multiples are expanding from 4 times in 2022 to 6.9 times in 2025. Therefore, it is critical to have confidence in the key sources of deal synergies and to go beyond high-level benchmarks and historic examples,” it explains. “One acquirer used AI to better understand cost synergies by constructing a hypothetical model of the target’s maintenance costs for a particular plant; it also used AI for commercial synergies by modeling how product flows to end markets could be better optimized.”

Embracing Transformation

Traditional integration processes focus on stabilizing operations to prevent disruptions, then combining the companies. Stabilization and integration matter, but Bain laments that integration teams often disband or move on before they have taken a third step: transformation.

“When a deal or a series of deals represents a meaningful expansion, companies should rethink regional operations, cross-plant synergies, maintenance, and sourcing strategies to more fundamentally transform how work is done and ultimately the cost base,” it advises.

According to the firm, such transformations represent at least half of the potential synergies from a transaction.

Transformation opportunities often exist in sourcing. “Many companies move to best pricing contracts and renegotiate with suppliers to leverage a greater spending base,” Bain acknowledges. “However, there is an opportunity to go beyond that and more fundamentally evaluate both procurement-driven (‘buying better’) and operations-driven (‘spending better’) levers. Bain research shows that techniques for spending better, which focus on what companies are buying, not just what they pay for it, can produce 60% of total savings.”

Other transformation opportunities exist on the commercial side of the business. “In oil field services, acquirers have for decades bought companies for cross-selling opportunities, but they are now creating entirely new solutions through more integrated offerings,” Bain illustrates.

In evaluating the potential for transformation, the firm says the best leaders have a long-term vision. “The leaders are thinking ahead by not only identifying the next deal but also the subsequent two to three deals that are then made possible,” it writes. “In some cases, the most aggressive companies even start to size the synergies from these potential future transactions when considering the deal economics of the first one. This is something we’ve seen from private equity companies for some time, and it’s starting to be adopted by corporate acquirers.”

Bain cautions that many acquirers never achieve transformation or only begin to do so two years after a deal closes. However, serial acquirers who follow best practices can often move to the transformation stage within a year.

For more details on these trends, see the energy-focused chapter of Bain’s 2026 M&A Report, M&A in Energy and Natural Resources: The Rise of the Oil and Gas Serial Acquirer.