This latest acquisition will further enable Hitachi Consulting to serve its clients throughout an entire business transformation life cycle, while continuing to focus on delivering successful, sustainable change for its clients. Additionally, this acquisition will expand Hitachi Consulting's European, North American and South American presence.

Celerant is a leading global business operations consultancy, with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, and a global client base that spans over 57 countries. By adding Celerant's vast expertise across the chemical, consumer, energy, industrial, life sciences, metals and mining sectors to its own unique skill set, this latest acquisition will provide Hitachi Consulting with a deeper level of industry-specific and associated process expertise. As a result, Hitachi Consulting will be able to offer robust consulting capabilities in new and existing target industries.

"We are very pleased to have Celerant Consulting as a part of the Hitachi Group. As Hitachi's largest in-house company, Hitachi Information & Telecommunication Systems Company ("ITSC") is targeting to grow revenue from the consulting business to 130 billion yen ($1.5 billion) by fiscal 2015. Under Hitachi's Social Innovation business initiative and global growth strategies, we expect sales of 800 billion yen ($9.6 billion) from overseas markets by fiscal 2015; 35% of consolidated ITSC revenues. We believe the acquisition of Celerant Consulting is key to accelerating achievement of these KPIs, and provides Hitachi with the ability to offer our customers deeper knowledge and expertise in Social Infrastructure fields including energy, mining, and various industrial sectors," said Shinjiro Iwata, Senior Vice President and Executive Officer, President CEO of Information & Telecommunication Systems Company of Hitachi, Ltd.

"Hitachi Consulting is committed to pursuing acquisitions that enable us to deliver a compleplete range of strategy, implementation, and technology services for our clients. Celerant already has a proven track record for designing and implementing value-based operational strategies for Fortune 500 companies on a global scale, and will therefore enable us to enhance the services that we can offer in this area," said Phil Parr, President and CEO of Hitachi Consulting. "As such, we are confident that this acquisition will enable us to deliver measureable, high value results, as well as sustainable benefits that will generate a strong return on investment for our clients. By leveraging the power of Celerant's unique capabilities, Hitachi Consulting is well positioned to assist business leaders to prepare for strategic transformations, to complete successful organizational change programs, and to deliver significant benefits to their bottom line as a result."

Because Celerant's operations consulting capabilities closely align with Hitachi Consulting's management consulting and IT consulting capabilities, the acquisition will bring increased scale and depth of management consulting experience to the combined company. In addition, Celerant's focus on delivering high value, sustainable results and investing in long term client relationships is culturally compatible with Hitachi Consulting's client service philosophy.

"Celerant Consulting was founded on the philosophy that delivering results needs to be an obsession, and Hitachi Consulting clearly shares that same vision," says Patrik Sjostedt, CEO at Celerant. "We have delivered successful, sustainable change for the world's leading companies for more than 25 years, and look forward to working with everyone at Hitachi Consulting to maintain and exceed these very high standards."