It’s been another busy few weeks for language-industry mergers and acquisitions, which shouldn’t surprise many who have been watching recent business trends. Last week, for instance, Acolad announced its acquisition of Ubiqus, bolstering its localization capabilities ahead of projected industry growth. For Acolad CEO Olivier Marcheteau, the partnership is a perfect fit. After running in the same circles for many years, Acolad and Ubiqus have formed a team they believe will mutually benefit both parties.
“We’ve crossed paths many times in the past — not just because we were direct competitors in some situations, but also in some moments of both our M&A journeys,” said Marcheteau. “The last three months were quite an intense part of this journey to make the deal happen — but we are very excited about what was achieved, for both companies.”
A big part of that achievement is identifying the complementary points that made the acquisition so natural. For one thing, there’s Ubiqus’ expertise in professional translation, transcription and interpreting markets. LIkewise, the company’s footprints in France, North America, the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Spain, and Italy. Acolad, meanwhile, brings an extended geographical footprint and sales and operations coverage that company officials believe will grow Ubiqus across Europe, the US, and Asia while expanding translation and content services.
“Ubiqus also has a unique experience in transcription with a combination of external vendors and an in-house pool of 120 professional writers which enables seven types of transcription types,” Marcheteau said. “Lastly, the proprietary R&D innovation Ubiqus has developed in Neural Machine Translation and Automatic Speech Recognition will clearly further reinforce the Group’s ability to provide cutting-edge technology solutions.”
It all adds up to a suite of services that targets solutions for translation, interpreting, transcription, content, and information management. The companies’ combined toolbox means 24-hour service targeting 25 countries.
“[The fact that] both Acolad and Ubiqus are strongly invested in technology and R&D is also a plus — in today’s landscape it’s paramount to compete on the technological side,” Marcheteau said. “The market is now quite demanding in terms of connectivity and efficiency, and it’s very clear to us that our complementary R&D efforts will enable us to truly stand out, especially on some of the fastest growing segments like life science, interpreting, or machine translation.”
One thing is for sure — it’s another dramatic business announcement in a year that promises to be full of them.
“We all feel this is a key moment for both companies — a real milestone in our combined history — and we are very eager to start working together as a team,” Marcheteau said. “As we share a very similar DNA, having built our way in the language services market through the right combination of technology and human expertise, we believe we will be able to build upon that legacy and leverage our complementary solutions portfolio to grow into a full-service multilingual content partner.”
