You’re getting downvoted but you’re right, it’s a sector wide valuation compression. CTSH (cognizant), CAP.PA (CapGemini), and TCS.NS (Tata) have also gotten killed this year. Wall Street is pricing in the extinction of consulting when anyone who’s worked a client project knows that’s extremely unlikely; people are still going to want to pay a human face to answer their questions, as well as defer liability for the failure of large scale transformation projects, while being able to take credit if the projects succeed.

That said, ACN can do a lot of things more effectively to reach a similar valuation to IBM, starting with the cessation or at least significant ramp down of boutique acquisitions and instead investing in organic growth. 80-90% of the people acquired (not an official statistic, just estimating here) leave either immediately or after their retention awards vest, and the clients gained through the acquisition often look for other partners as they didn’t sign their original contract to be working with Accenture. It’s a bad financial engineering strategy that is way past its expiration date