SDL Reports Strong Interim 1H 2009 Financial Results

By David Roe (@druadh20) Aug 6, 2009

With all the aplomb of a wet Monday in November, SDL (news, site) (which refers to itself in a recent press release as the ominous sounding “The Group”) announced quite casually this week that it has made lots of money in the first half of this year. Net interim cash of £32.9 (US$ 56) million to be precise.

Apart from the fact that, generally speaking, trading conditions globally have been “tough,” and the fact that SDL has already completely paid off the US$ 14.7 million price tag for the acquisition of XyEnterprise at the end of June, the preliminary figure represents a 10% increase in sales growth over 1H last year.

Announcing the figures, Mark Lancaster, Chairman and CEO of SDL said that, while they have spent much of the year reigning in their cost base across the company, the positive figures reflect, on the one hand returns on investments made in 2008, and on the other “organic growth in both technology and translation services”.

Lancaster added that the company doesn’t expect any improvements in trading conditions over the second half of the year and SDL will continue its strategy of expanding the Global Information Management (GIM) client base. SDL also expects full-year profits to be in line with 1H figures.

Building Revenues On Acquisitions

Since 2007, SDL has made a number of strategic buy-outs all aimed at the development of its Global Information Management (GIM) solution.

In April of that year, it sealed an agreement with Tridion, a provider of web content management solutions for €69 (US $99.4) million, which dramatically extended the breadth and offerings of its information management solutions significantly.

The combined solution offered by SDL with this deal created the analyst-recognized Web CMS with a global content management flavor, which allowed customers to not only create, but specifically maintain multilingual web experiences.

Then in February 2008, SDL announced the acquisition of Idiom Technologies Inc for US$ 21.7 (£11.1) million. That acquisition allowed to produce content management solutions with highly efficient translation management functionality.

Not to mention the most recent acquisition of XyEnterprise allowing for deeper XML andcomponent content managementcapabilities and access to a wider global market, particularly in Europe. Additional DITA capabilities are also going to add to their solutions as is the tight integration into SDL's GIM solutions.

Extending Global Information Management

Every acquisition has been geared towards the extension of its GIM solution. The way SDL sees it, is that if an international business is present in just 10 countries, by definition 90% of the content will be in a foreign language. The cost and complexity of creating and maintaining this content to ship products into multiple regions is enormous.