Top 100 in the world

Top 100 largest language service providers in the world – A Survey by Nimdzi

Who are Nimdzi?

Nimdzi is an international consulting company that conducts marketing research with one main goal: to present to its clients the data they need in order to be successful on a global scale.

With the help of a team of professional marketers, financial specialists, business strategies and growth consultants, IT specialists and other experts, they conducted a survey entitled Top 100 largest language service providers in the world. They have used publicly available information, data provided by the companies, data from financial reports from the companies’ latest fiscal year. The ranking is based on revenue and each company is represented by its key services. A great advertisement for the participants (especially those at the top).

What does the survey include

An interesting initiative of the compilers was to list the companies that almost made it into the ranking, giving them an honorary mention and promising to keep track of their development over the next year.

Another available list is that of companies which should be in the ranking, but they have not disclosed, published, or otherwise revealed their revenue. Furthermore, some organizations are units inside larger corporate groups where a small part of revenue comes from language services, and annual reports do not allow researchers to segment out the language services revenue. The list is meant to highlight their significant impact on the industry.

A curious fact discovered in the survey was that the revenue of the Top 100 participants increased by approx. 11.5 % from 2018 to 2019. The first 10 positions grew by 11.8 %, compared to 2018, the top 50 increased their revenue by 9.7 %, and the remaining positions from 50 to 100 – by 15.8 % compared to the previous year. Although the growth has slowed down a bit, the market is still growing at normal rates considering the industry’s size. Nimdzi, however, believe that the total annual growth will have a slight decrease of up to 6.2 % over the next few years.

Nimdzi estimate the size of the industry in 2020 at $57 billion.

Of course, being true professionals, the Nimdzi team took into consideration the spread of the coronavirus and its effect on tourism and entertainment and the consequences of this negative impact on the translation industry. Accounting for the estimated total annual growth of 6.2 %, they anticipate an industry growth of up to $77 billion in 2025.

Revenue-based ranking

The Top 10 companies make up 7.6 % of the market with their revenue amounting to $4.3 billion, the remaining 90 companies make up 6.9 % of the market with their revenue amounting to $3.9 billion. 5.6 % are occupied by the companies on our Watchlist whose revenue amounts to $3.2 billion, while the remaining 79.9 % are shared by all other companies. This proves that the industry is still predominantly made up of companies smaller than $10 million.

Geographical Distribution

Illustrated in percentages, the translation market distribution by continents is as follows: Europe represents 16.0 %, Asia 16.5 %, North America 10.4 %, Australia and New Zealand – 5.8 %. The biggest percentage of large LSPs is concentrated in Europe – 44 %, followed by North America – 38.7 % and Asia – 14 %.

As for the distribution of clients, Europe holds the lead again – 54.3 %, followed by North America – 29.9 % and Asia – 10.6 %. Far behind are Australia and New Zealand with 2.2 %, Africa with 1.7 % and South America with 1.4 %.

The conclusion is that the Asian and Indian markets are seen as promising geographic growth zones. For example, media and gaming localization companies are considering those markets. Nimdzi also highlights several trends in new services such as transcreation, machine interpreting, and the impact of Brexit on localization (the multitude of legal changes is affecting trade, finance, modifying employment contracts, and more, which will provide work for the legal sector in translations).

The whole survey can be downloaded and viewed here https://www.nimdzi.com/2019-nimdzi-100/

You can learn what the condition and revenue distribution in the translation industry is in Bulgaria with the ranking Top 100 translation agencies in Bulgaria – a revenue-based ranking and related survey on the current state and expectations of the translation industry in Bulgaria.

If you are a translation service provider and want to take part in the survey in Bulgaria, you can fill in the Questionnaire here.