LONDON, UK: RWS Holdings plc, a unique world-leading provider of technology-enabled language, content and intellectual property services, has acquired Liones Holding B.V. for €17.5 million (on a cash-and-debt free basis) with additional payments of €2.5 million due on each of the first and second anniversaries of completion.
The flagship product of Liones is Fonto, the leading cloud native, data driven authoring solution for mission critical documents. The Fonto suite of products allows non-technical subject matter experts to create, edit and collaborate on structured documents by hiding the complexity of the underlying mark-up languages.
Liones, based in The Hague, Netherlands, will continue to be managed by its founders, Jan Benedictus and Taeke Kuyvenhoven, and will seek to build on its historic record of strong revenue growth. In the year ended 31 December 2021, Liones recorded an operating profit of €2.0 million (2020: €1.2 million) on revenue of €4.9 million (2020: €3.5 million) from clients in a range of sectors including Life Sciences, Pharmaceuticals and Financial Services.
The acquisition will be funded from RWS’s existing cash resources.
Ian El-Mokadem, Chief Executive Officer of RWS, commented: “The acquisition of Liones enhances RWS’s leadership position in the structured content market. We already admire the merits of its Fonto product as it forms an important element within our existing Tridion Docs product, and believe that Fonto will enhance RWS’s capability to enable our customers to make the optimal use of their content. Today’s news also demonstrates our determination that RWS will remain a leader in the structured content market.”
RWS Holdings plc is a unique, world-leading provider of technology-enabled language, content and intellectual property services. Through content transformation and multilingual data analysis, our unique combination of technology and cultural expertise helps our clients to grow by ensuring they are understood anywhere, in any language.