RWS Establishes Presence in Africa

Acquisition marks RWS’s first local presence in Africa with locally-based expertise across 40+ African languages

CHALFONT ST PETER, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--RWS Holdings plc (“RWS”) today announces the acquisition of Cape Town-based STComms Language Specialists Proprietary Limited (“ST Communications”), one of Africa’s leading language services providers. Establishing a local presence and operations in Africa marks a significant milestone for RWS and will enable clients to further their reach into the African market with locally-based talent and linguistic expertise across 40+ African languages.

Founded in 2008, ST Communications has built a reputation for offering a wide range of professional language and linguistic solutions to African and international businesses. Its team of project managers and quality assurance experts work with a large network of highly skilled linguistic professionals across 26 African countries. The company offers localization services including translation, interpreting, software testing, subtitling and transcreation.

“We’ve partnered with ST Communications for several years now and have always been highly impressed by the team’s commitment to continually exceed client expectations,” commented Maria Schnell, Chief Language Officer at RWS. “The acquisition marks a natural next step for both our companies and re-affirms our strategy to continually innovate, diversify our portfolio and support clients looking to engage with global audiences.”

ST Communications’ services cover a wide range of industries, from life sciences and financial services to government, technology and gaming.

“Africa provides significant linguistic challenges for global companies looking to engage with local audiences,” said Sharon du Toit, CEO and Founder of ST Communications. “Our expertise in African languages is unrivalled and gives our global clients an opportunity to engage with the most linguistically diverse continent in the world.”

The acquisition also supports RWS’s commitment to provide clients with solutions and technologies for rare languages. RWS will extend the availability of machine translation engines for African languages by collaborating with local African universities, through the RWS Campus, and fine-tuning machine learning models with native speakers. The RWS Campus, which nurtures talent and provides free translation tools to 700+ universities globally, currently works with 16 universities across Africa.

About RWS
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 combination of AI-enabled technology and human expertise helps our clients to grow by ensuring they are understood anywhere, in any language.

Our purpose is unlocking global understanding. By combining cultural understanding, client understanding and technical understanding, our services and technology assist our clients to acquire and retain customers, deliver engaging user experiences, maintain compliance and gain actionable insights into their data and content.

Over the past 20 years we’ve been evolving our own AI solutions as well as helping clients to explore, build and use multilingual AI applications. With 40+ AI-related patents and more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, we have the experience and expertise to support clients on their AI journey.

We work with over 80% of the world’s top 100 brands, more than three-quarters of Fortune’s 20 ‘Most Admired Companies’ and almost all of the top pharmaceutical companies, investment banks, law firms and patent filers. Our client base spans Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and North and South America. Our 65+ global locations across five continents service clients in the automotive, chemical, financial, legal, medical, pharmaceutical, technology and telecommunications sectors.

Founded in 1958, RWS is headquartered in the UK and publicly listed on AIM, the London Stock Exchange regulated market (RWS.L).

For further information, please visit: www.rws.com