McKinsey buys Saudi Arabian management consultancy Elixir

International consulting giant McKinsey & Company has revealed that it has acquired Elixir, a Saudi Arabian consultancy with expertise in change management and implementation. The acquisition comes as McKinsey continues to purchase firms across the globe.

Elixir is a leading consulting firm serving clients in Saudi Arabia. Elixir has worked for more than a decade on piloting solutions and implementing transformation programs in Saudi Arabia with private, non-profit and public sector clients across industries. The firm, which specialises in management consulting, provides its services to local companies, organisations, individuals and the Saudi government.

Elixir and McKinsey will serve clients in the Kingdom independently and in collaboration, depending on client need. McKinsey’s 90 years of global experience in the consulting industry will enable Elixir to offer an expanded capacity to clients, making for a suite of services which could combine strategy consulting and change management with long term implementation of solutions.

Elixir will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of McKinsey, and its two co-founders Hani I. Khoja and Sami Alzuhaibi will continue to lead the company as co-CEOs, as well as sitting on Elixir’s Board of Directors. Elixir’s 140 employees will remain based at its offices in Jeddah and Riyadh. Financial details of the consulting transaction have not been disclosed.

The deal comes on the back of a number of global acquisitions for McKinsey, as it continues to expand its operations worldwide. In late 2016, the firm acquired Swedish design agency Veryday, and 90-plus designers, researchers, and other colleagues, who like Elixir, retained independence to continue to serve long-standing clients from their offices in New York, London, Dubai, Singapore and their headquarters, a rescued and renovated church in Stockholm, along with maintaining their independent brand.

At the very end of 2015, additionally, McKinsey also reeled in a trio of data analytics firms in the shapes of QuantumBlack Visual Analytics along with German 4tree and US-based VisualDoD to tap into the growing demand for data analytics.