By Florian Faes - Slator - April 9, 2019
Fresh off moving its global headquarters, TransPerfect delivers solid results. Despite being under no obligation to share financial results publicly, the world’s largest language service provider (LSP) by revenue announced revenues grew 8.2% to USD 166m in the first quarter of 2019 versus USD 154m in the same quarter of 2018.
The first quarter figures follow a strong showing in 2018, where the company grew 14.7% off mostly organic top-line growth to USD 705m in full-year revenues.
A company press release highlighted strong sales in the company’s GlobalLink Product Suite, which posted a 48% increase in what it calls unit sales.
While TransPerfect declined to break out revenue figures for individual product lines, TransPerfect CEO, Phil Shawe, told Slator that one-third of total revenues is generated through technology products; that is, licensing and maintenance, implementation fees, SaaS technology fees, and services that “flow to us via our technology.” The latter is crucial, of course. Providing a translation management system (TMS) to the enterprise tends to ease the path to winning the services business and vice versa.
In terms of industry verticals, Shawe expects TransPerfect’s key life sciences business to continue to perform well in 2019. Asked where he sees growth in 2019, Shawe highlighted a number of verticals and services not traditionally associated with TransPerfect as offering “potential high growth opportunities for us in services.” Among those he mentioned are Media (Dubbing and Subtitling), Gaming, Over-the-Phone Interpretation (OPI), Mobile App Localization, and Multilingual AI Training.
In all these five areas, TransPerfect faces entrenched incumbents (a) SDI, Deluxe, IYUNO, Zoo Digital, BTI, etc. in media; (b) Keywords Studios in gaming; (c) LanguageLine and CyraCom, etc. in OPI; (d) Appen, Lionbridge, etc. in Multilingual AI Training; and (e) countless providers in Mobile App Localization. That said, given TransPerfect’s scale, they could well become a formidable competitor in any area they so choose.
Asked about his 2019 outlook, Shawe told Slator, “TransPerfect tends to concentrate on share of customer spend versus market share. However, we expect growth in the overall market for language services and technology to continue.”
On technology, the CEO said: “We view technology advancements in the industry as enablers, and our experience is that when we can bring faster, better, and more efficient solutions to clients, any decrease in spend created by introducing efficiencies is quickly made up for by our being entrusted to handle a wider variety of engagements and/or a larger number of languages.”
Original Article: https://slator.com/financial-results/transperfect-q1-2019-revenues-grow-8-2-to-usd-166-million-year-on-year/