Serial acquisitions: becoming a full-service consulting group (2024)

Widening the field of play, and changing how you earn

This run of acquisitions can be read as a single story: from one business to a full-service consulting group. It was the work of filling the holding-company vessel prepared in 2016 — over some seven years, in order — with contents: manufacturing systems integration, security, design, management-strategy consulting. The founding idea, of taking on a client’s management problems whole rather than leaning on a keiretsu, seems to run through even the choice of what to buy.

Widening the field of play, however, is not the same as changing how you earn. Most of the adjacent fields taken in have so far not come to produce the margins of the core business, and group earnings are still carried by IT consulting. Whether the move to full-service grows into a capacity to take on clients’ management problems more deeply, or stays a loose arrangement of peripheries around a core — that, together with the next move of concentrated investment in generative AI, is where the substance of this consolidation will be tested from here.