Munich-based investment firm, Aurelius Group, is to acquire Telvent Global Services in Spain, Brazil and Chile from Telvent (a subsidiary of the French group Schneider Electric). Telvent Global Services provides IT consulting services. This might all sound ‘very far from home’, but Aurelius is the parent company of Getronics. And, while Telvent will remain a standalone entity (for now) and is not integrated into the Getronics family, the businesses will work together as Aurelius portfolio companies.
Getronics already has a notable applications presence in Spain following previous acquisitions (we estimate it had some 2000 applications specialists at last count). The firm, which has historically been infrastructure services-centric, is now selling application services in the UK market, delivered out of Spain. While this business is still relatively small (we estimate less than 10% of UK revenues), the intention is to grow this considerably as part of a wider plan to evolve the portfolio.
Mark Cook, group CEO of Getronics (see Mark Cook promoted to Getronics CEO role), is undertaking a strategy to reduce low margin business and build out capabilities in more profitable areas: namely unified communications (UC), consulting, applications and cloud. And we’re certainly seeing some progress. For example, in October Cook led the acquisition of NEC’s Enterprise Solutions business to add capability around UC (see Getronics buys NEC Enterprise Solutions business). New contracts in cloud services (e.g. Getronics moves Alpha into the cloud) also demonstrate that the portfolio has diversified away from its break/fix roots.
We suspect more acquisitions lay ahead as Cook takes Getronics on its journey through change. Furthermore, we don’t expect to wait too long before more purchases are made.