Ranking of Management Consultants in Europe in terms of prestige &exit opps

What is the ranking of management consultants in terms of prestige & exit opps, for Europe?

(AT Kearney, Bain, BCG, McKinsey, OC&C, Oliver Wyman, Roland Berger, Simon Kucher, Strategy&)

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I don't know much about eastern Europe, but I'd say that in Western Europe for MBB:

Bain in Italy. BCG in France, Germany, Nordics. McKinsey in England, Iberian peninsula and the rest.

In terms of overall footprint and prestige, it's McKinsey with BCG very close behind (increasingly as Germany thrives) and Bain a distant third. Roland Berger and Oliver Wyman have a powerful presence in western Europe as well. I'm based in the U.S. so this is mostly second-hand having recently posed the question to a handful of friends who graduated from INSEAD, LSE and other European b-schools in the last 5-7 years.

 

Tier 1: McKinsey, BCG (both strong but I'd say McK still has an edge), Bain (not as strong as the other two but reputation wise still very good)

Tier2: Roland Berger, Oliver Wyman, Strategy&, A.T. Kearney, LEK, OC&C (Berger should be the strongest in Europe but has shown weak performance in the last years, LEK and Wyman are good in UK due to their finance focus but elsewhere they are quite average)

Tier3: Simon Kucher, Deloitte S&O (especially weak in GSA region and France, stronger in UK), Accenture, Alix Partners, Arthur D Little, ZS Associates, Parthenon

Prestige is probably: MBB >>>>> Roland Berger > Oliver Wyman >= Strategy& = AT Kearney = LEK > OC&C (it all depends on the countries you look at, LEK and OC&C are strong in UK but weak in Germany)

Exit Options should be almost equal among MBB, Tier 2 shouldn't be too much of a spread. PE is probably almost exclusively for MBB.

 

I can only really comment on N and Central Europe, as I am not sufficiently familiar with S or E Europe. In northern Europe, in terms of presence it is BCG=>McK>Bain. To the extent that all three MBBs are respected, exit opps are comparable. However, you could also argue that exit opps are partially a function of footprint, so you could use the presence ranking as proxy for exit opps. For PE and IBq, I have seen tons of Bainees and some from BCG. For whatever reason I haven't seen any McMinseyites. Could just be coincidence, though. I saw on Linkedin one guy from PwC in PE but otherwise lower tier firms seem absent from PE/IB

The tech houses like Accenture and the accounting houses like Strategy&/PwC, Deloite have a presence with their 'strategy' arms but they are not considered to be remotely comparable. People I know in these companies (ACC & Del) have long operations engagements I know Roland Berger is big in German speaking countries and has some presence in the UK, but it's footprint in N Europe is minimal.

 

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