Capgemini aspirations in the US and India

Good article Capgemini to target expansion through acquisitions in the FT on 25th Feb 08. CEO Paul Hermelin plans “small acquisitions in the Us to bolster its consulting business”. On the other hands he seems to learnt a hard lesson from the acquisition of E&Y’s consulting business in 2000 where he rather understates the wisdom of the purchase as “not the right acquisition at the right time” or in my words “completely the wrong acquisition at the wrong time at a ludicrously high price where the integration of the completely differing cultures was botched”.

Interestingly Hermilin declares his target of having more than 50% of staff in India by 2010. that equates to 45,000 out of the 84,000 headcount by then. An 8000 headcount increase is planned to 28,000 by end of 2008.. Hermelin reckons any economic slowdown will accelerate that move as customers look to even steeper cost cuts in their IT budgets.