LINGO24, the translation services specialist, declared it is on track to turn over £10 million for the first time after returning to profit in the opening six months of the year.
The company, which was founded by Christian Arno in 2001, reported earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of £330,000 for the period to June 30. It was the first profit booked by Lingo24 since raising millions of pounds of investment to strengthen its technology platform and sales and management teams in 2014. The firm had booked an £81,000 loss in the first half of last year.
Lingo24 uses artificial intelligence which allows companies to present website content in foreign languages, helping them to trade in markets overseas. It employs professional translators during initial translation to ensure quality is maintained.
The company increased revenue grew by 23 per cent to £5.14 million in the first half. That came amid growth in business to business e-commerce wins, demand from clients to update content with the introduction of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the World Cup, which led to greater demand for promotional content from consumer-oriented clients.
With such high-profile customers as BrewDog, adidas and Hunter Boots, it said 73% of its revenue now comes from the company’s top 30 accounts, up from 70% in 2017 and 53% in 2015.
Mr Arno, who is the single biggest shareholder in Lingo 24, said the first half had been a “breakthrough” period for the firm.
He said: “Businesses are seeing they can get more content to market using the latest technology, and this is our main value proposition. If they are seeing it working in one language they will maybe extend it out to another language, and add in additional content. We feel that this is a bit of a breakthrough set of results in terms of starting to prove that our strategy works.”
Lingo24 has six offices in locations around the world: London, Romania, Amsterdam, Panama, the Philippines and Edinburgh.
Mr Arno said that the US is most likely to be its next port of call, though creating an office across the Atlantic is not on the immediate agenda. Customers in the US are currently being served by its offices in Edinburgh, Panama and Romania, he said.
Asked whether Brexit was a concern to the business, he said the only impact Lingo24 has seen has been from the fall in the value of sterling, which as a British-headquartered business has worked to its advantage.
“We haven’t, to the best of my knowledge, come across any situations where we have lost business internationally because we are a British firm,” he said. “And we are not in a regulated industry, nor are we reliant on regulated industries. We are cautiously relaxed about it.”
Moreover, while the vote to leave the European Union has made it more challenging to recruit staff in certain sectors, it is “not a major issue” for Lingo24.
The firm has raised a total of £4.2m in equity investment from two rounds to date. Chairman Paul Gregory, the former boss of Wood Mackenzie, came on board as its biggest investor in 2014. And Mr Arno, who noted that Lingo24 has more than 20 shareholders, refused to rule out raising further investment in future.
“There is a lot more we can do with the base we have got,” he said. “We will want to grow faster, so we are certainly not ruling that out.”
Mr Arno added: “Our business has changed beyond recognition, and the focus on building long-lasting strategic relationships with our clients is clear in these numbers. As the world’s most globally minded companies reap the benefits of the latest translation technology, they tend to invest in making more content more global.”
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