Capgemini, the Paris-listed IT services group, made 39 IT services acquisitions announced from 2015 to 2025 in our records: one large acquisition about every five years and specialists in design, platform services, data, cloud and engineering in between. The prices it has published are for listed companies, a median of 1.7x revenue on the five deals we can price, and its private deals stay private. For a private firm the price comes with an earn-out that Capgemini ties to the sellers staying, so the earn-out and its conditions carry as much weight as the headline price.
One of the largest IT services groups in the world, Capgemini had €22.5bn of revenue in 2025 and 423,000 people. iGate in 2015, Altran in 2020 and WNS in 2025 took 72 percent of the €13.5bn in cash it spent on acquisitions over those years, and the other €3.7bn went on the specialists. It pays full prices when it buys a listed company. For a private firm, the terms come out of a negotiation that the public record describes only in annual totals.
Capgemini’s universal registration documents for 2015 to 2025 give spend, financing and process, and with its releases they helped us complete the deal list we hold from Mergermarket.
Capgemini Subsidiaries and Brands: How Capgemini Is Organized
Capgemini runs through five strategic business units, four of them geographic (Southern and Central Europe, Northern and Central Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific) and one for financial services worldwide, split into 31 business units. Alongside them sit global business lines, the largest of which is engineering and R&D. Several of the group’s brands came from acquisitions:
| Unit or brand | What it does | How it arrived |
|---|---|---|
| Capgemini Invent | Strategy, design and transformation consulting | Created in 2018 from Capgemini Consulting and recently acquired firms, LiquidHub, Idean and Adaptive Lab among them |
| frog | Product and experience design, inside Capgemini Invent | Came with Altran in 2020 |
| Cambridge Consultants | Deep tech and product development, inside Capgemini Invent | Came with Altran in 2020 |
| Capgemini Engineering | Engineering and R&D services | Altran, acquired 2020, renamed in 2021 |
| Sogeti | Applications, testing, cloud development and cybersecurity | Capgemini’s founding company, 1967 |
| Syniti | SAP data migration and data management | Acquired 2024 |
| Cloud4C | Managed services for hybrid and sovereign cloud | Acquired 2025 |
| WNS | Business process services, being integrated into Business Services | Acquired 2025 |
By revenue, Capgemini is a European and North American business: in 2025 the rest of Europe brought 30 percent, North America 29 percent, France 19 percent, the UK and Ireland 13 percent, and Asia-Pacific and Latin America 9 percent. Applications and technology work is 63 percent of revenue, operations and engineering 29 percent, and strategy and transformation 8 percent. Aiman Ezzat has been chief executive since 2020.
Acquisitions run through a Mergers and Acquisitions Committee chaired by the chief executive, which examines deals from identification through to negotiation. The board sets an annual investment budget, and any acquisition outside it worth more than €100M, or that takes smaller deals past €300M in a year, needs the board’s prior approval. Below those limits the chief executive decides under delegated authority, and the board’s strategy committee is informed of each proposed deal.
How Many Companies Capgemini Acquires
The pace rose through the period, from 14 acquisitions in the five years to 2019, about three a year, to 25 in the six years from 2020, about four a year, with a peak of seven in 2022.
Capgemini’s cash-flow statements show €13.5bn spent on acquisitions from 2015 to 2025, including the Altran shares it bought outside its business-combinations line. Three years carry most of it: €3.4bn in 2015, €3.2bn in 2020 and €3.8bn in 2025, the years of iGate, Altran and WNS. Together the three deals account for 72 percent of the total. In the other eight years spending ran between €23M and €827M.
The large deals are funded with debt and refinanced in the bond market. For Altran, Capgemini arranged a €5.4bn bridge loan in 2019 and issued €5.1bn of bonds in 2020 to repay it and refinance Altran’s debt; for WNS, a €4.0bn bridge loan was replaced by €4.0bn of bonds in September 2025. Net debt rose from €2.1bn at the end of 2024 to €5.3bn a year later and €6.5bn at the end of June 2026. Capgemini’s stated policy is moderate use of debt, including in the way it finances external growth. Organic free cash flow was €1.9bn in 2025, more than twice the most it spent on acquisitions in any year outside the three large deals.
What Size of Company Capgemini Buys
An enterprise value is on record for 8 of the 39 acquisitions, with a median of $338M. Five of those eight were listed companies, so the disclosed prices describe the top of Capgemini’s range. Revenue is on record for eight targets as well, and it splits in two: three below $50M, two between $50M and $200M, and three above $1bn.
The filings give a truer picture of the typical deal. The teams its documents describe run from more than 80 people at Multibook, an SAP partner in Japan, and 100 at Oinio, a Salesforce partner in Munich, to more than 200 at Advectas in Sweden and 1,600 at Cloud4C. Its 2016 accounts put the cost of Oinio and Fahrenheit 212, a design agency bought the same year, at €22M in total plus earn-outs. From 2016 to 2023, Altran aside, its cash spend on acquisitions came to €1.9bn, about €240M a year.
As a rule of thumb, a firm of 80 to a few hundred specialists with a clear capability sits squarely in Capgemini’s bolt-on range, and firms of a thousand or more people appear too when they fill a gap in a priority area such as SAP or cloud managed services.
What Capgemini Buys
Capgemini describes its acquisitions as targeted deals to reinforce its position in high-growth areas, financed by its balance sheet. In 2025 its investment priorities were cloud, data and AI capabilities, AI-led transformation and intelligent operations, the term it uses for business process services run with AI. We sorted the 39 IT services acquisitions by what the target did, with its other deals in the last row:
| Type of target | Acquisitions |
|---|---|
| SAP, Salesforce and other platform specialists | 8 |
| Design, brand and digital customer experience firms | 8 |
| Engineering and R&D services | 6 |
| Cloud, cybersecurity and regional IT services firms | 6 |
| In-house IT units bought from corporate clients | 4 |
| Data and AI consultancies | 3 |
| Industry IT consulting (capital markets, energy) | 2 |
| Large IT services and business process groups | 2 |
| Beyond IT services: agencies and other businesses | 6 |
The platform specialists span SAP in Japan and Australia, Salesforce in Germany and Singapore, MuleSoft in Australia and Pega in Switzerland, followed by Syniti, an SAP data specialist, in 2024 and Cloud4C, a premium SAP cloud partner, in 2025. The design firms came from 2017 to 2022, agencies and consultancies in the United States, the UK, France and Finland, and several of them now form part of Capgemini Invent. Since Altran, the engineering deals have added semiconductor design, digital twins, automotive systems engineering, product design and nuclear engineering.
The four in-house IT units, from an insurer, a restaurant chain, a food cooperative and a bank, are a pattern of their own: Capgemini buys a company’s in-house IT team and runs it as part of the group.
Beyond its 39 IT services acquisitions, our records show six more, all of them other businesses: four agencies and design consultancies, a management consultancy for financial institutions and a compliance operations unit.
Where Capgemini Buys
Capgemini bought in 14 countries. The United States leads with 9 acquisitions, followed by France with 6, Australia with 5, Germany with 4, and the UK and India with 3 each. By region, Europe accounts for 19 deals, about half, Asia-Pacific for 11 and North America for 9.
Asia-Pacific stands out against Capgemini’s revenue mix. The region and Latin America together bring 9 percent of revenue, yet Asia-Pacific holds more than a quarter of the acquisitions: five in Australia from 2020 to 2024, three in India, including WNS, which added most of the 82,000 people the group gained in 2025, two in Japan and one in Singapore. Capgemini described 2021 as the year it extended its footprint in the region through acquisitions.
What Capgemini Pays: Acquisition Multiples
Capgemini publishes prices only in aggregate, so we checked each of the 39 acquisitions for both a price and the target’s revenue or EBITDA. Five qualify, and all five were takeovers of listed companies, from $77M to $5.7bn in enterprise value. Their median is 1.7x revenue and 16.3x EBITDA. Across IT services deals in our valuation research, the medians are 1.1x revenue (n=1,051) and 10.4x EBITDA (n=520), and for deals above $500M they are 1.6x and 12.7x (n=85).
The set skews large and public, and the split by size matters. The two takeovers below $250M priced at 1.3x revenue or below; the three above $3bn priced between 1.7x and 3.5x. On EBITDA the picture changes, because the two smaller targets ran thin margins: both priced above 16x EBITDA, and the three large ones between 12.3x and 18.3x. Each of the five prices includes the premium that buying control of a listed company requires.
As arithmetic, 1.7x revenue equals 17x EBITDA at a 10 percent margin, 11x at 15 percent and 8.5x at 20 percent. The two medians together imply a margin of about 10 percent, typical of IT services. For a services firm a buyer prices on profit, so the margin you report sets the price more than the revenue does.
For a private bolt-on, the price is set in a negotiation that Capgemini reports only inside its annual totals, and part of it can depend on what happens after closing. Capgemini’s accounts list earn-outs with conditions of presence among its integration costs: the sellers collect them by staying with the business. The headline multiple is therefore a range, and your contract decides where in that range you land.
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How Capgemini Structures a Deal
Capgemini pays cash in its listed takeovers, and it can build a position in stages: for Altran it first bought an 11.43 percent block from a group of shareholders led by Apax Partners in July 2019, then made a friendly tender offer, took control in April 2020 and bought out the remaining 45 percent within weeks. For WNS it agreed a cash price per share, won approval from WNS shareholders and the Royal Court of Jersey, and closed in October 2025, three months after the announcement.
For private companies the documents show two recurring features alongside the earn-out. Capgemini buys the whole company: every one of the 39 deals that states a stake was for 100 percent, and it has bought out minority holders later, as with a 22 percent stake in its Brazilian subsidiary CPM Braxis in 2015. And it grants shares to the people it acquires: a specific performance share award to 63 employees of Empired in 2021, and 54,542 shares to 33 managers in the context of the Syniti acquisition in 2025, vesting over three years and one week.
For an owner, that structure turns part of the sale into an employment contract. The earn-out, the retention shares and their vesting conditions carry as much weight as the headline price, and the definitions of each are open to negotiation before a letter of intent is signed. A private equity buyer can offer a different trade, part of the equity rolled over and sold again at its exit, one of the choices our guide to strategic versus financial buyers compares.
What Happens After Closing
Capgemini folds most acquisitions into its own units. In 2018 it brought Capgemini Consulting together with recently acquired design and digital firms under the Capgemini Invent name, and in 2021 it phased out the Altran brand and renamed the business Capgemini Engineering. Some brands stay: frog and Cambridge Consultants continue inside Capgemini Invent, and Syniti trades as part of Capgemini. WNS is being integrated into the group’s business services line.
Integration reaches the board: in 2025 its strategy committee reviewed the integration of recent acquisitions, focusing on the compatibility of business cultures, talent retention and value creation, and the board set itself the objective of monitoring the WNS and Cloud4C integrations.
Capgemini also sells businesses: it sold Odigo, its contact center software business, to Apax Partners in 2020, and in September 2026 it agreed to sell Capgemini Government Solutions, its US federal subsidiary, to ITC Federal, after concluding that US rules for classified government work left it too little control over the unit. That subsidiary included VariQ, a federal software and cybersecurity firm Capgemini bought in 2021. Ask for the integration plan and the brand decision in writing before you sign.
Capgemini’s Stated Priorities Decide How Hard It Competes for You
Capgemini is among the most active buyers in our ranking of strategic acquirers of IT services companies from 2015 to 2025, a list Accenture leads. It also appears among the most active buyers of systems integrators and data and analytics firms. The difference with Accenture is one of method: Accenture buys a steady flow of specialists every year, while Capgemini combines a smaller flow of bolt-ons with a transformational deal every five years.
In our view that makes Capgemini a selective buyer for most owners and an eager one for a few. If your capability sits in one of its stated priorities, Capgemini competes for it against Accenture, Cognizant, IBM, the Indian IT majors and private equity platforms building in the same ecosystems. Engineering firms face a different field, led by the Indian majors and European engineering specialists, which our page on digital engineering buyers covers.
Is This a Good Time to Sell to Capgemini?
At its Capital Markets Day in May 2026, Capgemini set a target of 5.5 to 7.5 percent annual revenue growth from 2025 to 2028 at constant currency, about two points of it from acquisitions. By our arithmetic, two points of growth on €22.5bn of revenue is about €450M of acquired revenue a year. Revenue grew 11.3 percent at constant currency in the first half of 2026, with WNS and Cloud4C included. Capgemini also carries €6.5bn of net debt after WNS and is restructuring under its Fit-for-Growth plan, announced in February 2026.
Its priorities are explicit: Capgemini says agentic AI now sits at the center of almost every client conversation, and it names cloud, data and AI, intelligent operations, sovereignty and defense as its growth markets. Its bolt-ons of the last two years match, with SAP data, cloud managed services and nuclear engineering.
Across the wider market, the median revenue multiple in our IT services valuation research was 1.3x in the first half of 2026, on 22 deals, an early sign of recovery after three years near 1.0x. AI is lifting demand for data, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity and AI integration work and compressing demand for traditional software development and staff augmentation. If your business sits in the first group, Capgemini is one of several buyers spending into it now. Elsewhere in IT services, the view from our IT services webinar holds: an owner with a reason to sell should sell, and the rest are better served strengthening the business this year and looking again in 2027 or 2028.
About Aventis Advisors
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