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CSA Research recently released our list of the 100 largest LSPs and langtech providers, along with eight regional lists that add more than 80 firms. The rankings are based on our annual survey of more than 450 companies around the globe with revenue and business data supplied by the companies themselves and validated by their executives. Here’s a map of CSA Research’s 10 largest LSPs for 2021 – follow the lines to see the journeys of these companies over 17 years to their current positions. But keep in mind that there are another 176 service and tech providers in our lists and another 264 companies that shared in-depth data with us, each with its own voyage. The colored lines indicate LSPs that have been on the Top 10 list for 10 years or more.
In future posts and research, we’ll analyze the data from the 186 firms that made it to one of our rankings, and the more than 264 others that did not make the list. But for now let’s look at the 10 largest companies that illustrate major themes in the industry: consolidation, the use of money both possessed and borrowed, data for machine learning, global content, extended content value chains, geographic expansion, and a focus on sectors – such as e-commerce, technology, and life sciences – that prospered in 2020.
Companies up and down the industry are taking these actions with the goal of offering more scalable, capable services, regardless of the language. And multiple firms are intent on creating IPO-ready companies through organic growth and mergers to increase their market value.
Let’s move on to follow the money for better returns, scale, and meeting global language demand in a variety of places – and doing so with multinational companies:
This sale by Lionbridge to a company outside the language sector is the biggest carve-out since HPE spun off its ACG enterprise service unit in 2017 to form business process outsourcer DXC Technology in a partnership with CSC. TELUS paid the tab for Lionbridge’s AI unit with debt, stock, and private equity – private equity (PE) is always lurking at the threshold. This carve-out moves the data business from Lionbridge and puts it in the hands of a company, TELUS, that made its initial public offering in February 2021. It will compete with data-selling LSPs and other globalization-aware data companies to support machine learning for multiple media.
The language industry serves organizations across the entire spectrum of commercial, governmental, NGO, religious, and other human activities. That means it’s affected by economic phenomena around the world. Here are two drivers in 2020:
Further down the list we find the langtech company most confident in its product – Japanese MT provider Rozetta made the gutsiest wager on its own product earlier this year when it banned employees from using any language other than Japanese because it says that its MT is good enough for doing business. We are always impressed by software vendors that take to heart the “eat your own dog food” philosophy. We’d also award Rozetta our MTV award for “Best video mission statement by an MT vendor,” which still resonates five years after its 2016 debut. This year, many more Chinese companies participated in our study, largely due to adding a few thousand Chinese LSPs to our database and translating the survey into Chinese. That led us to conclude that “can’t read, won’t take the survey.” But wait – there’s more. These bullets represent just the top of the list and there’s a lot more happening among the 186 companies in our sample and the hundreds more that participated but chose not to be ranked or weren’t quite there yet. Despite their size, they all manifest one or more of these themes of consolidation, the importance of data and annotation, global content rather than just localization, the need to diversify with more services, the mandate for geographic expansion, and a focus on growing verticals. For more on how CSA Research sizes the market, read our Frequently Asked Questions.
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