Singapore’s NCS acquires Australia’s The Dialog Group for $241m

NCS today announced its acquisition of Australia’s largest privately-owned IT services company, The Dialog Group (Dialog), to better support the Australian public sector and enterprise clients in addressing their rising digital transformation needs.

The acquisition of Dialog for A$325 million ($241 million) is geared to unlock new growth opportunities in the Australian market and accelerate NCS’ regionalisation strategy. Reputed for its extensive services portfolio from IT consulting, application development to managed application services, Dialog has presence across Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Darwin, and Adelaide, according to the announcement.

The acquisition combines Dialog’s core IT capabilities and NCS NEXT digital services to bolster its focus on innovation, cloud, artificial intelligence and data analytics. It also trebles the number of highly skilled IT specialists in its operations in Australia to 1,300 – ready to support clients from a multitude of sectors including government, healthcare, transport, communications, financial and commercial services.

This combination of talent and expertise will create a stronger end-to-end suite of technology and digital services for NCS’ clients in Australia and across the region.

“This acquisition is a significant step in the regionalisation of NCS and leverages the combined strengths of NCS and Dialog and their established track records and reputations across both Singapore and Australia. The scale of this acquisition, our largest to date, reflects our firm commitment to growing our business beyond the shores of Singapore, particularly in Australia where we can also leverage the strategic presence of the Singtel Group,” Ng Kuo Pin, CEO of NCS, said.

As part of its transformational growth plan, NCS has been scaling its presence in Australia since December 2020 to serve clients in Australia through NCS NEXT, its digital innovation and services arm – which supports enterprises’ growing demand for digital transformation solutions.

Together, Dialog and NCS will have greater opportunities for synergistic growth between Australia and Singapore as well as expertise to better support the needs of clients across both markets.

This latest deal follows NCS NEXT’s acquisition of two fast-growing technology companies last year: Riley, a cloud consultancy with dedicated expertise in Google cloud applications and Eighty20 Solutions, a cloud transformation specialist with unique capabilities across Microsoft cloud platforms, thus offering a ‘best-of-cloud’ service portfolio to the Australian market.