Roland Berger buys restructuring firm FMC Consultants
Roland Berger has acquired FMC Consultants, a Germany-based consultancy that specialises in restructuring advisory. FMC's two founding partners and Roland Berger alumni, Sven Gless and Andreas Robeck, return to their roots after more than 15 years running their own business and have been appointed Senior Partner.
FMC Consultants was established by Sven Gless and Andreas Robeck. The two advisors met each other at Roland Berger – Gless and Robeck joined in 1995 and 1997 respectively – and following a number of successful interactions and joint engagements the two decided to embark on their own adventure in 2000. In the past 15 years the founders built their advisory from scratch into one of the leading mid-sized players in the industry. FMC Consultants, which provides services in the area of strategy, turnaround management, corporate finance and business optimisation, is led by a team of five partners working out of offices in Bremen, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Stuttgart.
For Roland Berger, restructuring is one of the key areas of its heritage and current service portfolio, in particular in its home market Germany. In line with its ambition to grow its footprint in the field and beyond – the consultancy has set the ambitious goal to triple in size in the coming years – Roland Berger has decided to purchase FMC Consultants. With the move, the consultancy further deepens and broadens its restructuring expertise, and brings its total number of restructuring experts in Germany beyond the mark of 120, a tally which in its view makes it the “market leader”.
In recent years the restructuring space in Germany has been heating up, triggered by growing interest from the large American strategy consultancies in the domain and the further rise of specialised restructuring advisories. Early 2014, for instance, Roland Berger suffered a massive blow in its Restructuring & Corporate Finance Competence Center after 7 senior advisors left the firm to join rival McKinsey & Company. And later that year two other senior restructuring partners, Joost Geginat and Beatrix Morath, left the company to join AlixPartners. In its turn, Roland Berger itself has not stood still, it too has attracted several high-ranked consultants from tier-1 rivals, as well as seduced several former Roland Berger experts to re-join the firm, enabling it to maintain its number 1 (in terms of size) position in the restructuring German market.
As part of the deal, all employees of FMC Consultants will transfer to Roland Berger. Founder Gless and Robeck have been named Senior Partner, while the three other partners – Christian Glaser, Marco Horstmann and Alexander Müller – join the consultancy as Principals. The FMC Consultants brand will be dropped, although the team will, following integration, maintain its key focus on medium-sized enterprises across all industries. “We are thrilled that the longstanding experience and excellent contacts possessed by our new colleagues will be able to further enrich our consulting expertise in restructuring and corporate finance," comments Sascha Haghani, Deputy CEO of Germany and head of the Restructuring & Corporate Finance Competence Center.
He adds: “The German economy is built on the SME sector and it is important to us to optimally advise these clients on the very particular challenges they face. We combine and bundle all of the experience needed to overcome crises and put companies on the right strategic path.”
Chief Restructuring Officer study
Last month Roland Berger unveiled the 2015-edition of its annual ‘Chief Restructuring Officer’ study, concluding that the demand for restructuring officers is on the rise, albeit the nature of the role they are tasked with is changing.
