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Accenture has acquired CLIMB, a 200-person IT consultancy in Japan that helps local organizations with software projects and IT infrastructure maintenance.

The deal ties into the company’s acquisition-centric growth strategy. When a large consultancy such as Accenture wishes to expand into a new market or grow its existing regional presence, hiring more local employees one by one can be prohibitively time-consuming. It’s much faster to simply buy an established consultancy and use its office as a regional hub.

CLIMB mainly works with clients in Maebashi, a midsize city located northwest of Tokyo. The Maebashi metropolitan area has a gross domestic product of about $60 billion, which means there are probably plenty of companies that require help with their day-to-day IT operations. Maebashi is the capital of Japan’s Gunma Prefecture, a major agricultural and electronics manufacturing hub that is home to more than 10 universities.

CLIMB’s specialties include application maintenance, cybersecurity and cloud computing. The firm also provides systems integration services, which means it can help an organization link together the IT products it has bought to make them more usable. For example, an electronics supplier might create an integration that streams logs from a production line error detection application to a data archiving system.

CLIMB works with customers in multiple vertical including the financial services industry and the public sector. Many of those customers will likely move to Accenture following the deal, which further underscores why buying a local consultancy can be more efficient than building a regional office from scratch. Acquiring a local market player is not only faster but can also get the buyer new clients. 

“There are many talented engineers in regional areas of Japan who are leading digital transformation work,” commented Atsushi Egawa, Accenture’s top executive in Japan. “Providing opportunities for these individuals to shine on the global stage will help elevate their skills to new heights, while at the same time revitalizing the local economy.

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