DEMAN Acquires Life Sciences Specialist German Language Services (GLS)

Düsseldorf, Germany-headquartered DEMAN Übersetzungen has announced the acquisition of German Language Services (GLS), based in Cologne. Financial details of the deal, which closed October 31, 2024, were not disclosed.

DEMAN CEO Cédric Sigoire told Slator that the two language service providers (LSPs) had been in touch for a few years, but were reintroduced to each other by Dee Johnson of Language Transactions. “The geographical proximity made the initial discussions and the first contact easier,” he added.

Prior to the acquisition, the sole owner of GLS was Maia Costa, who took over the company from Courtney Searls-Ridge in 2005. Costa and the entire GLS team will stay on board, with Costa staying for at least the next three years. 

GLS and DEMAN have a combined 50 full-time employees — including 20 in-house translators and reviewers — located in Germany, France, the US, and South Korea.

DEMAN’s revenues reached about EUR 7m (USD 7.3m) in 2024; GLS, about EUR 1m. Sigoire noted that DEMAN’s goal for 2025 is to reach EUR 9m (USD 9.4m) in revenues. 

“Since I started in the translation industry in May 2015, our revenue grew from EUR 1.5m-8m (USD 1.6-8.3m), mainly through acquisitions,” Sigoire said. These include a number of German and international LSPs in 2021, followed by two German boutique translation agencies in 2023. 

“M&A is part of our DNA,” he continued, adding, “I am about to close the next deal in France in January 2025 and others are in discussion.”

As a self-described B2B provider of translation and other language services, Sigoire identified DEMAN’s strongest verticals as manufacturing, high-end communications, IT, and legal.

“We want to continue to develop into life sciences and pharmaceuticals,” Sigoire said of the company’s plans for the near future. 

Indeed, GLS, an LSP specializing in German-English-German translations, was the rare company to maintain four ISO certifications: ISO 9001, 17100, 18587, and 13485.

“Since DEMAN offers more than 40 language combinations, GLS will now be able to offer more services to their customers,” Sigoire explained. “DEMAN will also leverage the GLS ISO certifications to open new markets. We see the deal as a real ‘win-win.’” 

A Multi-Brand Strategy for Many Markets, Verticals

In addition to bringing on GLS’ team, DEMAN plans to maintain the GLS brand and develop it into verticals that require ISO-certified translations. This follows DEMAN’s existing multi-brand strategy.

“Our strongest brands are Traducteo and a4traduction.com in France and DEMAN, GLS, Easytrans24.com, and Textklinik in Germany,” said Sigoire, who serves as CEO for most of the companies. “We are, however, trying to unify the back-office and the processes to be more efficient.”

Behind the scenes, both companies mainly use Trados Studio. GLS trained its own machine translation (MT) engine, which may be implemented for additional customers. 

Sigoire shared that he has seen the demand for “main” language pairs, such as English-German in Germany, decrease in recent years, though the need for sworn translations of official documents seems to be growing in both France and Germany. 

MT is increasingly used for “short-lived” communications, such as social network posts and blog posts. And, while orders for printed materials have gone down, customers have requested multilingual SEO to improve their ROI.

With that in mind, Sigoire is optimistic about the year ahead: “The year 2024 was challenging in Germany, since our manufacturing customers were very cost-conscious. The year 2025 started slowly,but we won some tenders and are waiting for some really nice projects in the next weeks.”