Report by Sarah Hickey.
Table of contents
- What is this report about?
- Ranking of Premier Mid-Market Providers
- Methodology
- The mid-market by the numbers
- Location, location, location
- Trends and business challenges
- Conclusion
What is this report about?
If you follow Nimdzi, you know that every year we publish a report called The Nimdzi 100 that ranks the 100 largest language service providers (LSPs) in the world. It’s an important indicator that tells us a great deal about how the global market for language services has developed in the latest financial year, and historical data gathered over the years further allows us to generate trend lines and consider industry growth over a longer period of time.
That being said, it is just ONE indicator. And while we know that the top 100 LSPs concentrate just under 20% of total market revenue, we also know that the market is highly fragmented and predominantly made up of companies smaller than USD 10 million. In fact, Nimdzi estimates that there are about 22,500 LSPs with revenues below USD 10 million in the world, plus an additional 650,000 freelancers and one-person businesses (source: https://www.nimdzi.com/how-many-language-service-providers/).
So, it seems high time we shine a light on the next in line — the mid-market players, the welterweight division, the ones who have their ears closest to the ground and are keeping this industry afloat by being both large enough to cover a significant range of services and languages and yet niche enough to fill gaps for the big providers when it comes to languages of lesser diffusion, specializations, and access to local talent pools. The “premier mid-market providers” that are the engine this industry runs on.
Ranking of Premier Mid-Market Providers
Our ranking is a live document and therefore subject to change.
Notes:
- (FY) fiscal year, figures for the latest financial year (verified with financial reports)
- (v) verified, data provided by companies
- (e) estimated revenue, based on extensive industry research
- The ranking starts with position 101 to highlight that there are another 100 LSPs that are larger in terms of revenue but not listed here.
- There are four companies (2x2) who share the same ranking position (numbers 105, and 126) because their reported revenues were exactly the same. In these cases, the ranking number was repeated. This means that our ranking lists a total of 58 companies in 56 ranking positions.
- Several other companies appear to have the same revenue due to currency rounding. However, (aside from the six cases outlined above) the ranking order is accurate considering the second decimal.
Methodology
- In this ranking, we are listing LSPs that did not make the cut for the Nimdzi 100 despite technically being large enough (USD 10 million or more in revenue). Within the Nimdzi 100 report we list these same companies in our “Close, but no cigar” honorary ranking.
- The ranking further includes LSPs with revenues between USD 3 and 10 million in revenue.
- We’re listing full company revenue, not just language services revenue. It is impossible to separate these in external sources of information, such as annual reports, press releases, and stock listings, which provide the foundation for our work.
- We use data from the latest fiscal year for each company. This means the numbers for some companies will not reflect 2022 calendar year revenues.
- Our definition of language services includes: Translation, localization, transcreation, multilingual desktop publishing (DTP), language quality assurance, linguistic testing, multilingual copywriting, multilingual technical writing, language project management, interpreting, video remote interpreting, telephone interpreting, linguist verification and staffing, media localization, versioning, adaptation, subtitling, voiceover, dubbing, machine translation (MT), training machine translation engines, cultural consulting, data services, and related services.
- Growth rates are calculated in USD.
- We use average annual currency conversion rates to US dollars, published by the Internal Revenue Service of the United States for each day of trading in 2022.
Most importantly: This ranking does not claim to be a comprehensive list of all LSPs that fall into the USD 3 to 10 million revenue bracket. As our estimate of the number of LSPs in the world shows, we expect that there are at least 2,500 companies that potentially qualify for this ranking. So what this ranking provides is a snapshot and a starting point that honors those LSPs that provided their company data to us in recent Nimdzi surveys.
Are you missing from the list? Probably. Well, let’s fix that shall we? We encourage anyone who wants to be part of our rankings to provide their data here. We expect this mid-market ranking to grow significantly in the coming years, so make sure you put your company on the map!
This has been a preview. The full report can be accessed online by Nimdzi Partners.
This report has been researched and written by Nimdzi's VP of Research, Sarah Hickey. If you wish to learn more about the state of the language industry today, reach out to Sarah at [email protected].
