Japan's Dirbato acquires Singapore's Icon Consulting to go global in SAP
What's the deal? Tokyo-based IT consulting firm DirbatoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has acquired Icon Consulting Holdings, a Singapore-headquartered SAP staffing and consulting company, to accelerate its international expansion. The deal, which closed on April 8, brings Icon and its operations across Asia-Pacific and Europe into the Dirbato group.
Icon Consulting, led by founder and chief executive officer Harjit Khatkar, specialises in matching SAP talent with enterprise opportunities. It operates primarily through its core subsidiary, Icon Consulting Group.
Dirbato, which describes its mission as bringing "joy to the world through technology," has been actively pursuing M&A and capital partnerships to grow its IT consulting business beyond Japan.
Why now? Icon had already been positioning itself for a deal like this. Since 2024, it has received backing from Felicity Global Capital (formerly ACA Investments), a Japan-linked investment fund that helped accelerate Icon's international growth and brokered connections with Japanese companies. That relationship laid the groundwork for the strategic tie-up with Dirbato.
For Dirbato, the acquisition fits a broader push to raise the market value of IT consultants and engineers outside Japan — a goal that requires a global footprint the firm previously lacked.
What could go wrong? Cross-border acquisitions in professional services are notoriously tricky. Integrating teams across Asia-Pacific and Europe with a Japanese parent company brings cultural, operational, and regulatory complexity. SAP consulting is also a competitive market, with global incumbents like Accenture and Deloitte dominating large enterprise engagements.
Neither company disclosed financial terms, making it hard to assess whether Dirbato paid a fair price — or overpaid for growth.
The signal: Dirbato's classification as a "breakout" stage company on Dealroom underscores the ambition driving this deal — it's a firm still scaling rapidly, not a mature acquirer diversifying defensively. The acquisition reflects a broader pattern of mid-sized Japanese IT services firms using M&A as the fastest route to global relevance, particularly in SAP consulting where client relationships and talent networks take years to build organically.
Read more: prtimes.jp
