US listed Donnelley Financial Solutions (Donnelley Financial) filed its FY 2017 financial results on February 28, 2018. Net sales showed a slight increase to USD 1bn (2016: USD 983.5m), but net earnings plummeted to USD 9.7m (2016: USD 59.1m).
Donnelley Financial was one of three units that printing giant RR Donnelley – with annual revenues of USD 10bn – broke up into back in 2016 and independently listed. Prior to that, Donnelley Financial generated about USD 1.05bn in sales as a division in 2015.
As part of its end-to-end services, RR Donnelley had a language solutions division that became subsumed under Donnelley Financial after the split. That division is now reported as a ‘Language Solution and other’ unit by Donnelley Financial in its annual report.
‘Language Solution and Other’
‘Language Solutions and other’ reportedly grossed about USD 81.5m in 2015 before the split. Net sales for the unit then grew to USD 85.1m in 2016 (4.4% year-on-year) and now, USD 92.9m in 2017 (9.2% year-on-year); still not a core business for Donnelley Financial but big enough in the language industry to be considered a significant player.
Of the USD 92.9m, nearly half of it came from the US operations (USD 47.1m). The balance was from their international operations. However, since becoming independent, Donnelley Financial has not provided further breakdowns of the revenue sources by country or region.
It is also not possible to establish how much of this unit’s revenue was derived from core translation services and how much from “other” services since this info is not provided either in their annual report.
Slator reached out to Managing Director Christophe Djaouani, who heads the Language Solutions team. He told Slator, “The Donnelley Language Solutions business grew 4.7% in 2017, continuing a multi-year trend of strong revenue growth.” He declined to comment on revenue or profitability numbers since the company does not break this out publicly.
Further clues about the unit’s performance can be gathered from an analyst call held on February 28, 2018, where Donnelley Financial’s CEO Dan Leib and CFO Dave Gardella discussed the full year results. Gardella said that in the International segment “lower transactional activity was partially offset by growth in translation services within the segment”.
Finally, commenting on their effort to focus on four areas of languages solutions (transcreation, website localization, video dubbing and subtitling, machine translation post-editing), Djaouani said that, “We are making very good progress with the expansion of these key services. They are all embedded into our industry solutions packages to provide a tailored experience to our customers in each vertical.”
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