Booz & Co. – No Longer a Rumor

PwC announced today that it has come to terms to acquire Booz & Co.  The deal is still contingent on approval from approximately 300 Booz partners, which is not a trivial step.  Regardless, this comes as somewhat of a surprise given PwC had previously made two large scale acquisitions in Diamond Technology and PRTM over the last three years.  This is larger than either of those and even larger than the two combined (at least from a revenue perspective).  Booz & Co. has long rumored to have been marketing itself for sale and instead of Accenture, Infosys or one of the other Big 4 (EY or KPMG who have not done a large acquisition – Deloitte acquired BearingPoint (Federal) and earlier this year Monitor, both out of bankruptcy) it appears it will be folded under the PwC umbrella.  The Management Consulting landscape continues to shift and clearly the Big 4 are leading the way in this tectonic industry shift.  The big question is who will be next?  Roland Berger and LEK have been rumored to be in discussions – what will the response be from KPMG and EY who appear to be falling behind in the race to bring a formidable Strategy through Execution consulting offering  to the market.  Equally interesting, we will keep an eye on the large global strategy firms (McKinsey, Bain, & BCG) to see how they will respond to the Big 4 aggressively encroaching on and reshaping  their market.