As we head into the second quarter of 2018, it is time to check back in on how the shares in the select group of publicly listed language service providers (LSP) have been doing on the markets (2017 edition here). The small list of companies, whose shares are traded on the stock market, include RWS, Keywords Studios, Appen, SDL, Zoo Digital, and Japanese Honyaku Center. For the purposes of this article we omitted Poland’s Summa Linguae, whose trading volume is relatively small, and Japanese LSP Rozetta, where week-on-week data was hard to come by.
After a strong run-up that began in mid 2015 and peaked in late 2017, shares in RWS have traded largely flat since the start of the year. The UK-based LSP, whose acquisition of rival Moravia made the headlines in October 2017, still weighs in at an impressive USD 1.7bn in market capitalization, which gives the company a lot of firepower for potential future acquisitions.
Game localizer Keywords Studios, meanwhile, continues its upward trajectory as the company executes its aggressive M&A strategy. Keywords generated EUR 151.1m in revenues in 2017 and USD 28.2m in pre-tax profit and, for good measure, disclosed that it had translated 250 million words over the course of the year.
