The Hindu Business Line : Lionbridge to hire freelancers

Chennai, April 1 Lionbridge Technologies, a company operating in the area of content, software and application development cum testing company, plans to aggressively hire freelancers to do certain editorial and testing jobs. Currently freelancer hiring across the content development industry is need based. According to Mr Robin A. Lloyd, Vice President and General Manager, Lionbridge Technologies, the company plans to create a model to evaluate freelancers so that they may considered no different from regular employees.

Currently Lionbridge has about 1,600 employees in Mumbai and Chennai, of which about 20 per cent are vendor staff and a small number of freelancers. The company plans to increase headcount to 2,500 by the yearend with a substantial number of freelancers on its rolls, he said.

“We are also considering outsourcing specialised tasks (such as desktop publishing and others) to companies in tier-III cities to ease infrastructure costs,” Mr Lloyd said. This will help the company focus on more niche and high end services.

Remote worker

To make the best use of infrastructure, the company is also exploring the remote worker concept where a set of employees may need to come to office say thrice a week or lesser, while working from home the rest of the time. These, along with other measures are expected to increase the company’s productivity.

In order to improve margins, the company has come up with a business model that focuses on total cost of ownership (TCO) for clients. This means that though clients would be paying more for such projects as far as billing rate per person is concerned, they would save substantially on the overall project costs. For instance, if the per page cost is about $25, can Lionbridge do it at $20? -- is the value proposition.

One of the components of this model is to offer clients multimedia content development that includes animation and graphics. Globally companies are migrating from text-based content development to digital development and Mr Lloyd said this would help clients save on printing costs, translation costs (in most cases manuals are made available in multiple languages), shipping costs and downstream support (call center). Currently Lionbridge is pilot testing this model with a couple of large clients.

For the year ended December 2007, the company declared revenues, of $452 million (about Rs 1,808 crore), of which India contributed $50 million (about Rs 200 crore).

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