As Warren Buffet mentioned in his recent shareholder’s letter, “Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.” I am sure many companies wish it were that easy when looking back on 2009. However, there are many changes from 2009 that we here at Welocalize would not alter, because those changes put us into an even better position for 2010 than we had hoped. Our Q1 2010 results highlight this fact with total sales up 24% year over year while our top-50 clients increased their business with us by 25%!
We made a very difficult decision in 2009. We decided to refer a large number of clients who had only sporadic needs to new providers who could better meet those needs. We then invested heavily in growing in tandem with the needs of our strategic accounts. Welocalize has built a global platform with a sizable infrastructure. We cannot be all things to all clients, but we do want to be everything to a specific group of clients – our strategic accounts where we have created a true partnership. As Mr. Buffet continues in his letter, “If Charlie and I were to go into a small venture with a few partners; we would seek individuals in sync with us, knowing that common goals and a shared destiny make for a happy business marriage.”
Our “business marriage” with our clients is built upon the foundation of our 4-Pillars: Customer Service, Quality, Innovation and Global Teamwork, and these principles should be self-evident in all of our relationships. Our goal is to reach #1 in each pillar for each of our clients, so please feel free to let me know how we are doing!
We have some exciting things planned for 2010.
• Keep an eye out for our next release of CrowdSight which will include powerful new community features which I call bridging the first and last mile of our supply chain.
• GlobalSight continues to gain momentum with eight new clients having begun implementations in Q1, and we have exciting integrations planned with other open source/open system products later this year.
• InSight is rapidly becoming the most powerful business intelligence tool in our industry with more new reporting features planned.
• MarketSight is meeting the need at Microsoft to manage distributed sales and marketing translation needs in a self-service portal, and with their input and others, we are planning some powerful new enhancements.
Our year has started in a very strong way, and I want to thank you for your continued support.