Lionbridge to Triple Workforce in India

Posted on November 4th, 2005 by John Yunker

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.