It can. The requirement is generally one continuous year of qualifying employment abroad within the relevant preceding three-year period, and an acquisition may place part of that year with a predecessor employer. Gather the dates and documents first; whether the earlier service counts is a case-specific legal assessment.
Document the year before arguing about it
Set out a simple timeline: hire date, closing date, any change of entity or gap in employment, and any period already spent working in the United States. Attach the records supporting each segment rather than a summary written from memory. If the applicant moved between group entities during the period, note each move.
A clean chronology lets a reviewer assess the qualifying year quickly; an unclear one invites questions that hold up the whole file. Two points frame that chronology before anyone reads it. The qualifying employment abroad is generally one continuous year within the relevant preceding three-year period, so the question is when the person worked for the group and not merely whether they did, and after an acquisition the records answering it usually sit in more than one payroll or personnel system with no single index across them.
And the L-1B ceiling is five years in total, with time already held in the classification counting toward it. Both are questions about dates rather than about the person's ability, which means they are settled by retrieving records rather than by describing the role. Hypothetical example: a point-of-sale configuration specialist's continuous service is recorded across two personnel systems that use different start-date conventions, and reconciling those conventions against the employment contract is what establishes the qualifying year, not any account of what the work involved.