Horn & Company acquires Swiss GEM

Christian Horn

The founder is likely to have put his advice in the top 10 in Germany with the acquisition.

(Photo: Horn & Company)

Dusseldorf The medium-sized consultancy Horn & Company from Düsseldorf is strengthening itself with a Swiss competitor. “Firstly, the takeover of GEM will give us economies of scale and secondly our internationalization,” explains founder and managing director Christian Horn in an interview with the Handelsblatt.

In the medium term, a consulting company needs an annual turnover of at least 100 million euros in order to be a major player in the fast-growing management consulting market with increasingly broad and international orders, explains Horn: “GEM was just the beginning. We are therefore planning and examining further acquisitions.”

With the takeover, Horn is living up to its own claim of no longer just being a consultant, but also an entrepreneur. When he set up his own consulting company in Düsseldorf in 2009, he had “zero customers and zero sales”.

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Eleven years later, Horn & Company has a turnover of around 40 million euros, employs 150 people and, as number 20 in the German market, is a so-called “hidden champion”, particularly active in the financial industry, industrial companies and retail.

In the summer of last year, the 58-year-old took a further step in order to be able to expand his consultancy more and thus lead it out of its “growth and succession weakness”. He and his partners entered into a 50/50 partnership with Dutch financial investor Waterland. Together they wanted to “find and integrate like-minded people” and thus create a new growth platform for medium-sized consulting firms.

GEM founders become shareholders at Horn & Company

The acquisition of GEM is now the first in this market offensive. GEM is a Zurich-based strategy consultancy founded in 2014, which employs around 35 consultants and has an annual turnover of 15 million euros. With its customers, primarily from the financial industry, the company supplements the existing range of Horn & Company.

The name GEM is integrated. The eponymous founders Philipp Güth (41), Samuel Egger (36) and Thomas Mülchi (38) become shareholders of Horn & Company.

With GEM, Horn is getting a little closer to its minimum target for sales development. In the Lünendonk ranking of consulting firms headquartered in Germany, the company should now be among the top ten.

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Horn and the financial investor Waterland are thus driving the consolidation of the German consulting industry. This has been reflected in many mergers and acquisitions for some time now. And it’s not just financial investors or the leading international strategy consultancies McKinsey, Boston Consulting and Bain, or Accenture, which started out as an IT consultancy, that are driving consolidation forward.

The strategy consultancy Advyce from Düsseldorf and the Perlitz Strategy Group are trying a similar approach to Horn and Waterland. They merged in 2022 to form a consulting firm with more than 100 consultants. And it was only in mid-February that Alix Partners took over the consultancy THM, which specializes in restructuring, with around 40 partners.

More: The consulting industry is consolidating.

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