John Yunker is founder of Byte Level Research and author of the widely acclaimed book, Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies and editor of Global By Design.
He has covered the emerging field of Web globalization for half a decade and has published a wide range of reports dedicated to best practices in Web localization and internationalization.
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Going Global focuses on the risks and rewards of expanding into new geographic and cultural markets, from Web globalization to international marketing to global usability.
According to this article Chief Operating Officer Satish Maripuri says Lionbridge will triple its India workforce over the next few years.
Lionbridge had its Q3 earnings call this morning...
With one month of the BGS acquisition under its belt, Rory Cowan says so there have been only "pleasant surprises" about the acquisition. He said that had BGS been under their belt for the entire quarter Lionbridge would have hit $100 million for the quarter.
In Q3, Lionbridge won new work in government and with a "global shipbuilding company." It is growing Merck to $7-8 million per year. Is doing more work with Google. I think Google could be a huge software client down the road if it begins to localize Web-based office applications. That said, Lionbridge is still awfully heavy into tech and software localization.
Other notes from call:
- Lionbridge is pushing Web-based translation memory tool Logoport hard. Has trained 1,000+ BGS employees on it.
- BGS had developed some machine translation software which will be integrated by Lionbridge with Logoport.
- Working through $15 to $20 million in cost reductions, a little more than half is due to head count. Consolidating offices in Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Beijing, Korea.
- Logoport could have a nice impact on margins by this time next year due to lower software (SDL/Trados) costs and translation memory leverage.
- Seeing the number of languages increase -- up to 80 languages required for a recent cell phone launch.
- Seeing more US-ES work.
That said, not all analysts are so bullish about the Lionbridge numbers -- a few on the call wanted to know "where's the growth?" Lionbridge stock is current down about 7 percent. Might be a good time to buy...