LTM Ltd is acquiring Randstad’s subsidiaries in Europe and Australia for $186 million as chief executive officer Venu Lambu buys out a former employer’s businesses in the first acquisition since coming into existence after the merger of parent Larsen & Toubro’s two information technology (IT) services companies.
LTM will acquire Randstad’s technology and consulting business in France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Australia, representing €469 million (or about $500 million) in annual revenue, the Bengaluru-based company, the sixth largest in India, said in a statement on Friday.
LTM was formed in November 2022 after Larsen & Toubro made a hostile bid to acquire Bengaluru-based Mindtree and later merged it with L&T Infotech.
This acquisition makes for almost double LTM’s incremental revenue of $271 million last year. With $500 million, LTM’s revenue would total about $5.2 billion as against Tech Mahindra’s $6.39 billion reported last fiscal.
Randstad, which follows the January-December financial calendar as against LTM’s April-March calendar, has reported a revenue decline for the past two years – falling 13% and 11% in 2025 and 2024, respectively. On the other hand, LTM’s revenue jumped 6% to $4.76 billion in FY26, at its fastest pace.
Lambu previously headed Randstad for two years until January 2025, after which he took over as CEO-designate of LTM.
The Randstad acquisition is expected to widen LTM’s footprint across aerospace & defence, automotive, utilities and BFS, which together make up more than three-fifths of the company’s business.
“By combining our global AI-centric capabilities with local context and industry depth, this acquisition would strengthen our ability to deliver compliant, domain-driven AI services and sovereign solutions in markets that are strategically important to us,” Lambu said in the filing with the stock exchanges.
“By partnering with LTM, we would ensure our clients continue to receive world-class services while we streamline our portfolio to invest in growth segments and digital marketplaces that offer the most scale and value,” Randstad CEO Sander van ‘t Noordende said in the filing.
AI-first services
According to Phil Fersht, CEO of HFS Research, Randstad may have decided this business no longer fits its core staffing-centric operating model, while LTM sees an opportunity to industrialize and platformize those capabilities more aggressively under an AI-first services model.
“The question investors should ask is not ‘why only $186M?’ but whether Randstad wanted out and whether LTM believes it can extract materially more value from these assets than Randstad could,” he said.
As part of the acquisition, LTM will manage Randstad’s global capability centre operations for five years and some of its employees are expected to transition to LTM.
“LTM gets access to the new verticals (aerospace and defence) and we expect LTM’s Europe exposure to increase beyond 20% from ~15% currently,” said Sushovon Nayak, lead IT analyst at Anand Rathi Institutional Equities.
The company expects the acquisition to be completed in the July-September 2026 period.
The acquisition comes after the company advanced its goal to double revenue to almost $10 billion by FY31 on the back of large deals and AI-driven, high-value services even as the rise of automation tools and an uncertain geopolitical environment continue to challenge IT services.
With its new five-year plan, parent L&T is setting an ambitious goal for Lambu, who assumed the top job in May last year. The company won its largest deal four months after Lambu took over as CEO. In October, the company was awarded an IT transformation deal valued at $585 million over six years, from US entertainment company Paramount Global.
Acquisitions seem to be the way forward as the country’s largest tech services companies commit to buying capabilities and market access.
On 26 March, Infosys Ltd said it plans to buy US tech services companies Optimum Healthcare IT and Stratus for a total of $560 million, taking its acquisition spending in a fiscal to an all-time high of $808 million.
Wipro Ltd spent $446 million on its Olam and AlphaNet acquisitions, more than what it spent in the previous fiscal, when it bought Harman Digital Transformation Services (DTS) in August for $375 million.
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