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Rory Cowan, chairman and chief executive officer of localisation company Lionbridge, told ElectricNews.Net that many of the company's approximately 200 strong Irish workforce will move away from doing "repetitive tasks" and become more involved in areas such as project management.
"The contribution and flexibility of our staff and management in Ireland has shown us that they have the skills sets to take on high value tasks," said Cowan. Lionbridge also currently carries out capability testing, and application development and maintenance at its Irish facilities, which are in Dublin, Mayo and Galway.
The change though is unlikely to lead to additional staff being taken on by Lionbridge in Ireland. Cowan said that the general economic situation was still too tenuous to commit to such an expansion. However, he did also rule out the possibility of job losses as a result of the new approach.
Cowan was speaking a month after Lionbridge said that revenues for its second quarter, which will end on 30 June, should exceed USD28 million and EBITDA would be more than USD1 million, approaching breakeven net income on a GAAP basis.
Lionbridge also said it expected to have positive net income in the second half of 2002, and 2003 revenues should be in the region of USD130 million, which would yield around USD5 million positive net income, or about USD12 million of EBITDA. At the start of 2002, Cowan had said he expected year-on-year growth to be in the region of around 20 to 25 percent, however, he now says that 15 percent growth is more likely.
The localisation business has suffered along with other IT sectors in the last couple of years. Although Lionbridge had been affected by the downturn, Cowan said it had managed to evade much of it be taking early action in cutting costs.
"We cuts costs back in the first quarter of 2001 when it wasn't readily apparent to many people that the dot com bomb was coming. Those cuts saved us USD30 million per annum and this company now has a cost cutting culture," he remarked.
Another element in Lionbridge's survival, said Cowan, was its decision to change its focus from telecoms businesses to industrialised companies. "We broadened our customer base to bring in leading organisations that were looking to utilise the Internet to reduce the costs of their multilingual communications," he said Cowan. Lionbridge currently has customers in the technology, financial services and life sciences sectors.
Lionbridge Technologies employs around 1,000 people worldwide and provides testing and compatibility services, globalisation solutions and multilingual content management technologies.
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