With the release of the Nimdzi 100 this week, business leaders and analysts within the language industry are taking note of the latest companies on the rise. And topping the list is Toppan Digital Language, which took the top spot in the report as the industry’s fastest-growing company. Toppan Digital Language President Christophe Djaouani spoke with us about the work his team has done to achieve the distinction.
Congratulations on being named the fastest-growing language service provider (LSP)! How does the team feel seeing their work pay off like it is?
We are all thrilled to receive the award from Nimdzi. Having been founded less than two years ago, we wanted to make a strong entrance into the market — this says our team has achieved that. I am proud that we can unlock the full potential of our team to achieve these results. We are all passionate about our work; hard work always pays off!
Our purpose is our superpower. It fuels our drive to continuously innovate and improve. We are thankful for the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on our clients’ businesses.
What do you attribute that exceptional growth to? What’s the company’s secret sauce, so to speak?
It may look from the outside that we have grown through acquisition, but, in fact, over a third of our monthly revenue is from organic growth. We’ve been taking market share from our competitors across all regulated verticals. This indeed was what we set out to achieve when we created Toppan Digital Language. We saw how customer needs were rapidly diverging from the generic services that LSPs were supplying. Glad that our “origin story” has been validated so far.
It’s our customer centricity and specialism, at scale, that is our strategic underpinning. Still, our secret sauce is, without a doubt, our people, their deep expertise, and their drive to serve our customers. We like to be creative and agile in a dynamic market. We keep striving to innovate, adapt and anticipate our customers’ needs. This enables us to stay ahead of the curve and maintain sustainable growth.
You specialize in some high-value verticals like life sciences and healthcare, market research, and financial and legal services. What’s driving demand in those verticals, and how does it factor into Toppan’s growth?
Clearly, all those markets are growing, but the nature of demand is also changing. Without going into the specifics for each market, the overall pattern is a growth of volume and velocity of content (accelerating time to market), an increase in the number of end markets, and a rise in complexity, both in terms of the content types (often linked to regulation) and content operating models.
Generic responses to all those trends no longer suffice. That is why we focus on building client or sector-specific solutions. This means offering tailored, flexible solutions (service + tech) that are “easy to use” and “easy to implement” in a complex environment.
Credentials are an important factor in winning customer trust, and Toppan has many. What are the key credentials potential customers look for when seeking out an LSP? Is this an important element for winning new business?
For sure, a key element is the relationship that our people have built up with clients over many years, but it is a constellation of factors that enable us to win new business. Clients absolutely want an LSP that understands their specific sectoral and business needs, so we build sector specialism that includes tailored proprietary technology solutions. While our company is a fairly new entrant, our people are not, and so our customer intimacy is authentically built by a wealth of experience.
We also invest heavily in areas around accreditations, quality processes, compliance, and security that would be expected by the largest enterprises in the most demanding sectors. Finally, being part of Toppan Inc., a multi-billion-dollar international publicly traded company, enables us to invest and scale quickly and gives us credentials in Asia that are attractive to many clients.
Attracting a customer is one thing, but keeping them is another. What are the most important elements of your customer experience that keep them coming back?
We genuinely put the client at the heart of our business and invest in making the relationship work for the long term. It sounds easy to talk about, but far more challenging to keep this focus going. This involves being very disciplined — maintaining quality daily and staying close to the client, but also bringing innovation to the table and, critically, working very hard to fix things when they go wrong.
Is there anything else you want to add?
We want to sincerely thank the many people who have supported us so far, our clients and, of course, the TDL employees. We have brought two businesses together and attracted a large amount of new talent.
Thank you for putting your faith in us. Keep watching this space, as there is a lot more to come! We are here for the long term and are committed to delivering high-quality language solutions that meet the evolving needs of our clients and the market as a whole.
