Australian language services provider Straker Translation has officially purchased American translation tool company Lingotek, according to mandatory public disclosure reporting in Financial Times. Straker Translation is traded on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Under Australian law, listed corporations must notify the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) when “the products of the merger parties are substitutes or are complementary to each other” — as translation management systems (TMS) and services are to one another. Financial Times — an Australian business newspaper — shared the news in a running ticker tape of deals at 9:50 am Australian time, January 21 2021.
Grant Straker, Straker founder and chief executive, said the acquisition is key to Straker’s ongoing plans for expansion. The deal brings with it access to 20 enterprise customers and partners, including Oracle and Nike.
This is a roughly US $6.74 million deal, with Straker Translations paying out $5.27 million in cash, and Lingotek receiving the remaining $1.2 million in stock. In 2020, Lingotek’s revenue was $US 7.9 million. The disclosure predicts Straker Translations will therefore reach break-even on the buy during the company’s 2022 fiscal year.
Lingotek is a cloud-based translation services provider, offering translation management software and professional linguistic services for web content, software platforms, product documentation, and electronic documents. In 2006, Lingotek was the first US company to launch a fully online, web-based, computer-assisted translation (CAT) system and pioneered the integration of translation memories (TM) with a main-frame powered machine translation (MT). Since then, the company has been expanding and modifying the tech it offers companies.
In the last six months Straker has seen its share price increase by 50%, and this acquisition is likely to continue to increase Straker’s stock prices.
