Technology-enabled language specialist acquires Dutch cloud data company for £14.5m

RWS Holdings, a Buckinghamshire based provider of technology-enabled language, content, and intellectual property services, announced that it has acquired Liones Holding B.V. for €17.5m (approx. £14.5m).

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 December 31 2021, Liones recorded an operating profit of €2m (2020: €1.2 million) on revenue of €4.9m (2020: €3.5m) from clients in a range of sectors including Life Sciences, Pharmaceuticals, and Financial Services.

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.”