Leading Localization industry company Lionbridge (LIOX) held a conference call this week to report financial results for Q1 2011. It makes for interesting reading. You can read the transcript of the call here.
I tend to over-simplify things, but here is my brief analysis of this call.
- Business is not great at Lionbridge. The revenues are lower when compared with Q1 of 2010. Lionbrige CEO Rory Cowan admits that revenue has been flat for the last 3 quarters. Lionbridge reported a loss for the quarter.
- Lionbridge stock has been downgraded, read about it here. Stock market analysts TheStreet are telling their clients to get rid of LIOX stock.
- The stock price is about half of what it was one year ago, on the day that LIOX announced the RTTS deal with IBM.
So what does a CEO do when the present is not that great? He talks about the future. And Lionbridge’s future, per Mr. Cowan, lies in Geofluent: the IBM-Lionbridge MT platform.
Geofluent allows us to address enterprise demand for a technology solution that can instantly translate communications such as chat sessions, user-generated content, and websites, and I’m pleased with the ongoing market interest in this technology and the activity coming out of our partnership with IBM.
Lionbridge CEO Rory Cowan in May 9 conference call
The big questions are: can Lionbridge convert some of the budding accounts that are trying MT into cash cows? How long will it take? Will Lionbridge be able to grow sales through the use of MT? These are the questions I would be asking if I was a LIOX shareholder.
Who are the Beta Customers?
So we’ve completed three beta programs for Geofluent, and the results underscore the value of this technology offering. Our testing has proven that our unique customization capability increases the quality, usability, and comprehension of the MT engine. So this combination of IBM technology, and Lionbridge knowledge is really proving to be as powerful as we had hoped. The metrics are truly compelling.
Lionbridge CEO Rory Cowan in May 9 conference call
Who are the three beta customers who have been using Geofluent. What’s the big secret? Why not tell us who they are?
I would like to suggest a few possible names who may be these beta testers. These are all, to the best of my knowledge, LIOX customers. And this is the type of content which Mr. Cowan seems to be targeting as part of his vision.
- Intel. Their product support site is translated into a number of languages, all of which are supported by GeoFluent.
- My Oracle Support is translated into Chinese and Japanese.
- EMC. Their Support and Training site is translated into a few languages.
Why so few languages?
Google has like 50 languages. Microsoft has about 34. GeoFluent only has 11 (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic). How do I know? Lionbridge says so here.
Me and some other readers discussed this in a blog post I wrote last year. It is puzzling that IBM-Lionbridge has not released more languages since then.
Multilingual Chat as a global support tool
One of the main uses of Geofluent will be for chat sessions, where clients can ask questions in any language and get answered in their own language-even though the person on the other end does not speak their language. Senior Product Manager Saul Marcus just posted an article to the Lionbridge blog in which he describes Geofluent multilingual chat in detail. Read it here.
MT is Trending
Lionbridge is betting that MT will become a major source of income. SDL made the same kind of commitment when it bought Language Weaver last year. This is good news for the MT segment of the translation industry.
Related articles
- What IBM has to say about virtualization and cloud computing (zdnet.com)
- Social media localization? It’s all about listening. Day 2 of #mlwpisa (gts-translation.com)
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