We continue to summarize the results of 2021 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Ilya Spiridonov, Commercial director of Alconost.
How did 2021 go for the company?
As in previous years, we have been growing organically throughout 2021: both in volume and in the number of customers. We have never had an exponent: after all, localization is difficult to scale quickly and significantly, but we can boast of stable linear growth and predictable development.
This year we launched the Japanese direction — so far as an experiment, but there is already a mini-team that represents our interests in Japan: a sales manager, a project manager and a marketer.
From the non-trivial for us: launched Pikaban.com — mass banner generator. This is a product that has practically nothing to do with localization, but it drives our product team very much and allowed us to diversify slightly, and in general brings a fresh stream to the everyday localization.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?
Localization is a rather conservative niche. Apart from a few mergers and acquisitions that have caused some ripples in the market, there is rarely anything that significantly changes the landscape. Nevertheless, I would single out two trends in recent years: the development of machine translation and the growth of vendors’ “manufacturability”.
We are trying to keep up with these trends: in 2021 we launched several pilot projects in which we do PEMT (Post-Edited Machine Translation) — in fact, machine translation proofreading. We even managed to sell this service to one of our biggest customers — Google. And we are still pumping our technological side: we are working on our own platform gitlocalize.com and, of course, we are developing our fast online translation service Nitro.
In general, we strive to be not just another “translation agency”, but rather a system integrator that can offer not only a full cycle of language services, but also help with building a technological solution for the localization engineering team.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?
We plan to continue regional expansion: we will build mini-teams in individual countries. In addition, we plan to pump expertise in machine translation. Perhaps we will launch or buy some other product. This usually happens with us without any plan or strategy, and sometimes just for fun.