Type Partnership Website www.rolandberger.com Founder Roland Berger Number of employees 2,400 | Industry Management consulting Headquarters Munich, Germany Founded 1967 | |
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Key people • Roland Berger, Honorary Chairman
• Charles-Edouard Bouée, CEO
• Marcus Berret,
Chairman of the Supervisory Board CEO Charles-Édouard Bouée (Jul 2014–) Revenue 1.2 billion USD (2011 estimate) Motto Creative strategies that work Profiles | ||
Roland Berger is a global strategy consulting firm headquartered in Munich, with 50 offices in 36 countries. The company was founded under the name Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in 1967 by Roland Berger. In 2011, the company's sales were roughly US$1.2 billion. The company, with around 2,400 employees worldwide, is an independent partnership wholly owned by its approximately 220 partners.
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Roland Berger operates as a generalist strategy consultancy and advises clients on management issues ranging from strategy development to performance improvement. Roland Berger advises in the fields of restructuring and marketing, with a focus on the automobile industry and the capital goods sector.
History
Company founder Roland Berger established the firm in 1967, after four years of working for Gennaro Boston Associati in Boston and Milan, Italy. By 1987 the firm became the largest consultancy in Germany, with sales over DM 100 million.
To finance overseas expansion, Berger then allowed Deutsche Bank to take a minority stake, rising to 75.1% in 1988. This proved to be a problem in the United States, where the Federal Reserve Bank did not allow subsidiaries of commercial banks to practise consulting, so the company's managers bought back Deutsche Bank's shares in 1998 and 2000.
In November 2010, the firm reached an advanced stage in talks to merge with Deloitte's consulting arm, but withdrew after Roland Berger's partners decided instead to invest more of their own resources. In 2013 the partners requested the executive committee to consider "external options" and a possible sale — Ernst & Young reportedly made an offer which was eventually rejected by the partner group. In June 2015, Roland Berger acquired the entire team from German consulting firm FMC Consultants GmbH.
The company announced a rebranding of its business in September 2015, introducing a logo it describes as a "titanium B" combined with the lettering "Roland Berger", dropping "Strategy Consultants" from the company name.
Organization
Corporate organization is based on global offices, referred to as "competence centers", along functional and industry lines.
Roland Berger has a total of 50 offices in 36 countries around the world. Four of these offices are in North America: Chicago, Detroit, Boston and Montreal.
Services and clientele
Roland Berger provides restructuring and marketing advice, but its practice areas also include corporate development, corporate finance, information management, operations strategy, performance improvement, and strategy development. While its clientele is largely in the automobile industry and the capital goods sector, other industry specialties include energy and chemicals, engineered products and high-tech, financial services, information communications, pharmaceuticals and health care, public services, and transportation.
Roland Berger clients include corporations, non-profit organizations and public institutions.
Projects and initiatives
Since 2013, Roland Berger's pro bono engagement has focused on promoting education via the Roland Berger Foundation, which was established in 2008 by the firm's honorary chairman Roland Berger and endowed with EUR €50 million. With its German scholarship program, the Foundation supports gifted children and young people from socially disadvantaged families. As of 2014, the program supports 500 individual pupils aged 6 to 18 years across Germany.
In 2006, the company founded the Best of European Business Awards. It sponsors the Counterparts initiative to support culture and education in Central and Eastern Europe, and also supports the Young Global Leaders program of the non-profit World Economic Forum. The firm has also been a supporter of Focus: HOPE, a non-profit organization aiming to overcome racism and poverty through education, which is based in Detroit where Roland Berger has one of its U.S. offices.
On 30 January 2012, the company said it was in the process of collecting €300 million from financial institutions and business intelligence agencies to set up an independent non-profit credit rating agency, to be called the European Rating Agency, which could provide its first country ratings by the end of the year. On 19 April 2013, the ERA effort failed after negotiations with a private European group of investors ended without agreement.
Key people
Publications
think: act is the brand aggregating the corporate publishing formats of Roland Berger, which include books, brochures, magazines and surveys. think:act magazine is put out three times per year, with editions in Chinese, English and German. Through its academic imprints, Roland Berger has published over 40 books.