It can, where the acquisition transferred the underlying procedures to the petitioner and the successor relationship is documented. The knowledge must now be the petitioning organisation's own.
The acquisition has to be shown, not assumed
The regulation speaks of knowledge of the petitioning organisation's product, service, equipment, techniques or procedures. When a company acquires a competitor and takes over its intellectual property, processes and staff, those procedures become the acquirer's own, and an employee's expertise in them is expertise in the petitioner's procedures. The evidentiary burden is to show the transaction and the integration.
Provide the purchase agreement identifying what was acquired, particularly any intellectual property schedule listing the protocol, and then the internal documents issued afterwards in the petitioner's own name: the current specification, revised work instructions, training material and customer-facing documentation. Without that chain, a reviewer sees a specialist describing work done for a different company, which is precisely what the classification does not cover. Where an acquisition is recent, the integration evidence matters more, not less.