Jacobs buys remaining PA Consulting shares – with a potential Oz return on the cards

Global engineering and professional services firm Jacobs has fully acquired PA Consulting, an eighty-year-old UK-formed advisory which has been slowly building up its team in Australia.

Jacobs, which is based in the US and has a crew of around 2,500 employees stationed downunder, has held a majority stake in PA Consulting since late 2020, but has now acquired the remaining PA shares for a reported sum in the region of $1.6 billion.

Established in England in 1943 amidst the country’s war efforts, PA Consulting is recognised as one of the world’s leading advisories in terms of management and technical innovation, with lines in manufacturing, defence, energy, transport, and life sciences among other areas.

“By fully bringing together the expertise of PA and Jacobs, we can better empower clients to overcome today’s complexities and embrace tomorrow’s opportunities,” stated Christian Norris, who took over as PA chief in 2023. “Extending PA’s valuable brand and positioning in innovation and transformation consulting will enable us to tackle the broadest range of client challenges.”

Globally, PA Consulting is home to around 4,000 consultants and digital experts spread across 18 or so official offices in the UK & Ireland, US, Netherlands, and Nordic region, yet some of those have been migrating to Australia in recent times, joining a small team led by partner Marina Johnston out of Sydney and focused on large-scale agile transformations for the financial services sector.

Return to Australia?

It’s not exactly new territory for the eighty-year-old consultancy though, with PA previously having a 50-year presence in the country up until its departure in 2007 and some sources suggesting that Australia once contributed around a third of the firm’s global revenues, which have nowadays surpassed the £800 million mark after doubling its take over just the past six years.

As per LinkedIn activity, PA a year ago completed its first major assignment on Australian soil in more than a decade and a half, an eighteen-month agile transformation for a quite well-known local bank (which bank?), with an original on-the-ground team of six swelling six-fold over the project’s duration. Still, more PA consultants have continued to arrive downunder since then.

Presently headquartered in Texas, Jacobs has a similar pedigree to PA Consulting, having been founded in California in 1947, with its Australian heritage dating back to the $1 billion purchase of local outfit Sinclair Knight Merz in 2013. Former SKM senior leader Patrick Hill now heads Jacobs’ global operations out of Melbourne, overseeing the firm’s projects all across the world.

With Jacobs taking full ownership of PA, it’s possible the advisory could once again be officially reintroduced to the Australian market, with fellow long-running US and European consultancies Arthur D. Little and Roland Berger only recently taking their first steps, undoubtedly encouraged by the rapidly-scaled success of Oliver Wyman and Alvarez & Marsal over the past two or so years.

PA’s global consulting services leader Sam Bunting described a former Deloitte recruit in mid-2024 as the firm’s ‘first Australian hire’, while more recent management consulting import Nick Wade said; “Exciting times ahead for PA Consulting. Looking forward to collaborating further with the brilliant Jacobs team here in Sydney, who have been so welcoming to us already.”