Acquisitions are likely to play a bigger role in the coming year at distribution giant Applied Industrial Technologies Inc., President and CEO Neil Schrimsher told investors last week.

Speaking after Cleveland-based AIT—which sells about $5 billion annually of industrial motion, power, control and automation gear—reported its fiscal fourth-quarter results, Schrimsher said building on his team’s track record of nearly 20 acquisitions in eight years remains a big growth priority.

What has changed of late: “The M&A backdrop is increasingly productive as targets face heightened competition, required operational investments and extended ownership life cycles,” Schrimsher said on an Aug. 13 conference call.

The picture he painted is one that affects many manufacturing business but also speaks to other parts of the economy when it comes to smaller firms: Years of needing to deal with supply-chain snarls and cost pressures have weighed on margins. The need to set up new technology systems, many of them built around artificial intelligence tools, also is stretching budgets in new ways.

And the third element of Schrimsher description of the M&A market might be the most important. “Extended ownership life cycles” in this case points to the many companies acquired by private-equity companies early this decade. Typically, PE pros look to improve the operations of their companies and then sell them five to seven years later. But the pandemic and other disruptions since have extended that timeline for many investors, leaving them with more companies than expected under their umbrellas: Research firm PitchBook early this month said PE firms now own nearly 33,600 portfolio companies, an increase of more than 1,000 from December and more than double the number a decade ago.