Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this, the second Capital Markets Day of the RWS Group. Otherwise known until 7:00 A.M. this morning, I should say, as the largest company on the LSE that nobody's ever heard of. I and my team hope to banish that description by the time you leave later today. In case you don't know, I'm Andrew Brode. I'm the Chairman of the group and 23% shareholder. I bought it, as you saw in the video, in 1995, together with 3i. I've experienced most of the milestones that were referred to in the video. Following on from our largest ever acquisition, namely SDL, our senior management commissioned and has been deeply involved in a comprehensive strategic review of the business.
The results of that review underpin what you're going to hear in our presentation this afternoon. Today, the group is as you see on the slide. The group floated in November 2003 and produced excellent organic growth all the way through to 2015 without the benefit of acquisitions at all of any substance. We embarked in 2015, 2016 on what has been a very successful and highly profitable M&A strategy focused largely on the United States and of course, latterly in the U.K. with the acquisition of SDL. Much so that, as I say, we are one of the largest players on AIM, or as of 7:00 A.M. this morning we were, and a global leader.
We have more than 7,500 employees, talented employees, a progressive dividend policy, highly cash generative with the strongest balance sheet in the sector, excellent margins, truly one of the leaders in language. Clearly, one of the principal purposes of the Capital Markets Day is to highlight and reinforce the investment proposition. This is a long-term sustainable business, well-diversified with most of its verticals, highly tech-enabled. Emphasize we are a business support services business, but highly technology-enabled, so we would like to have avoided being taken down in our share price as being identified as part of the tech constituency. A business support services business, do not lose sight of that. You will hear how much support we give our customers throughout the afternoon. We're very strong in Life Sciences and in finance and legal and in Intellectual Property Services.
We have a big position in automotive, both in traditional automotive as well as the emerging electric vehicle sector. It's underpinned by a unique platform marrying the largest network of linguists with proprietary AI and machine translation, and you'll hear much more about that this afternoon. With excellent M&A opportunities from a fragmented market and superior ESG credentials, it's difficult to understand what there is not to like about the RWS investment proposition. Today, we will provide you with a detailed and wide-ranging picture of how the team sees the next five years. We have great people, a customer base to die for, strong tech, market leadership. I, for one, have never felt more confident about the future of RWS than I do today, despite the world around us lurching into uncertainty.
We shall now show a second video, following which our CEO will take over this presentation. Thank you for your time.
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Ian, CEO of RWS. It's a real pleasure to welcome you all here today, and also those of you who are joining us on the webcast. I've been with the group about eight months, and we've spent much of that time thinking deeply about the future plans for this business. To say we are really pleased to be at the point where we're sharing them with you is an understatement. During that period, we've also been listening. We've been listening to our customers, we've been listening to our people, and we've been listening to all of you. What I hope we'll do today is answer a lot of the questions that I've heard, that we've heard over that period. Today we're going to explain to you how we plan to build on our unique market position.
We're going to provide, I hope, some really deep insights into what we do and how we do it. We're gonna share our plans for accelerating growth in the business. Critically, we're going to explain to you how technology is a key enabler of our growth plans, and we're also going to outline a number of investments that we are planning to make in order to deliver on this accelerated growth plan. As importantly, today is a really great opportunity to meet our team. The whole exec team, bar one who's got COVID, are here today. Our entire board are here today, and a number of my colleagues are around to answer questions, and we've got two demonstrations during the breaks as well. Please take the opportunity to meet the team, to ask any questions you've got about what we do and how we do it.
We really want you to leave today with a really good understanding of RWS today and RWS where we want to take it in the future. We also want you to understand who we are in terms of how we work together. Today, we're also launching a new set of company values. We're also going to update you on our ESG thinking as well. By the end of the day, you should have a pretty complete view of the group. Here's the agenda for today. I'm going to outline the group's story, the growth model. I'll then hand over to my colleague, Maria, who's our Chief Language Officer, who will talk about our linguistic operating platform. This, I think, will be quite revealing in terms of how we deliver that core service that underpins the group.
I'll then hand over to Jon, who leads our Regulated Industries division. There'll then be a panel Q&A, followed by a break with some technology demonstrations in the room next door. Thomas, who leads our Language Services and Technology businesses, will kick off the second half, supported by Mihai, will talk about our AI platform, Language Weaver. Thomas will talk about Trados and Tridion, our translation management, productivity, and content management platforms. Chris will update you on M&A. Des will come and obviously talk about the financials, and then I'll wrap up. There'll be another Q&A session, and then we can all go and have a well-earned drink. Now, let me give you an update on the group as it's structured today post the SDL merger. This will be familiar, I hope, to many of you. We're organized into four divisions.
You can see the revenue split along the bottom there based on FY 2021 numbers. Down the bottom are sort of, you know, if you like, the key names that we take into the market. I think probably the area of most sort of that will be the most revealing today will be that Language and Content Technology box, where we've spent quite a bit of time thinking about the products that we acquired with SDL and where we want to take them and how we can drive growth with them. You'll hear us talking through the course of the afternoon about three product families: Language Weaver, which is artificial intelligence, Trados, which is all about translation management and productivity, and Tridion, which is a content management suite of products.
We're also gonna talk to you a little bit more about what underpins those customer-facing divisions in terms of our support model. We're gonna talk to you about some of the investments we're making in finance and HR. We'll talk to you a little bit about governance. Critically, we're gonna introduce you to what we call our Language eXperience Delivery team. That's the team that Maria leads, who will follow me, and that will really give you an insight into how we aim to leverage our scale as the largest provider of linguistic services on the planet using technology and very talented people. It will also be a critical source of operational leverage for the group as we move forward. The group has shown that through the power of organic growth and M&A, we can drive diversification.
Today, we are a well-diversified business, and with that comes resilience, and with that comes the ability to access accelerated growth. We've expanded our addressable market. We've already shifted the group to focus on higher growth markets, increasing our exposure to things like technology and the very attractive Regulated Industries division. Through the course of this afternoon, we're gonna talk to you about how we plan to continue to shift the business towards the more high-growth segments in our market. There's a lot that's going really well in this group, and these are many of the reasons that I joined back in last summer. A very impressive, diverse client list framed by very long-term client relationships. Markets which do enjoy some very attractive tailwinds, and we'll update you on that as we go through the course of the afternoon. Deep global linguistic and subject matter expertise.
We are already highly technology-enabled, which is critical in terms of the future-proofing of the business and in terms of our own productivity. Talented, experienced, and passionate people. There is a real vibe around RWS that you feel when you're in it. People really care about what they do. They care about their clients. They're passionate about succeeding on behalf of their customers. A proven financial model. There are some things we need to develop further, and we'll be talking about investment to drive accelerated growth through the course of the afternoon. Broadly, there are sort of three things to think about here. First of all, investments that are directly about improving organic growth, winning new logos, growing more with our existing clients, increasing our exposure to higher growth segments, and the enabling tools and technology and people to do that.
That's all about investing to increase the competitive moat that we have. There's then a place of investment which is around the technology products, and also about positioning those products so we're better able to take them to market. If I'm honest, some of those products in the Language and Content Technology division have been a bit lost. We have too many. What we're trying to do through the course of this plan is focus on the products that can win and put real sales and marketing resource behind those products. We'll talk more about that through the course of the afternoon. Then finally, there's some internal housekeeping to do to build a more efficient platform on which to, you know, add further growth to the business. We're continuing to invest in our operating platform that we'll talk about shortly.
We're continuing with our investment in our IP Services division, which you should all be aware of. We'll also be, you know, building a better set of finance and HR systems. We have too many today, so the plan is to have one finance backbone for the group and one HR backbone for the group. There is some investment to do that. We'll also be thinking quite a lot about our structure, our culture, and our values, and I'll update you on all that just shortly. Let's step back. Why does this business exist? Well, alongside the work we've been doing, we've come up with a new purpose for the group: unlocking global understanding. You can't imagine how long it takes to come up with three words. Those words have been chosen very carefully.
Understanding is at the heart of what we do across all of our divisions. We are here to help people understand each other across cultures, across languages. We are global. We're proud of the fact that we're global, but it is also really important that we are global because the clients that come to us come to us because we help them to take their products and services into new markets. If we don't have that global reach, we aren't as relevant to them. We've chosen the word unlocking because I hope, as you'll see during the course of today, what we do is quite complicated. It's an interesting blend of technical expertise, cultural understanding, linguistic understanding, and it's bringing those things together in products that mean something for our customers. There's kind of the magic dust that sits inside RWS. Who are we?
A unique world leading provider of technology-enabled language, content, and IP services. We are unique. No one has the combination of linguistic reach and proprietary tech that we have, and I hope you'll see that as we go through the afternoon. What do we do? Actually, we're gonna try and peel this back through the course of the afternoon because I'm not sure how many people really do understand what we do. At a high level, what do we do? Through content transformation and increasingly multilingual data analysis for our clients, that unique combination of technology and cultural expertise helps our clients to grow their businesses by ensuring that they're understood anywhere and in any language. This is where that magic dust starts. Take deep client understanding, and we do understand our clients well. We have very long-term relationships.
I'll show you some data in a second. We have to understand our clients' businesses because we can't help them to reach the audiences they want to reach if we don't. We also have to have quite often deep technical understanding of our clients' products. You can't translate a patent. You can't, you know, help with launching a new medicine if you don't have people who understand what it is they're translating in a fairly deep way. Deep technical understanding. As I've learned since I've joined, it's more than just having people who speak languages. That's obviously critical. My colleagues who work as translators have deep cultural understanding of the languages in which they're operating. As Maria will demonstrate, we don't just translate word A into word B.
We help our clients to make sense of what they're trying to do in different cultural contexts. It's by bringing those things together that we provide great solutions. What do those solutions look like? Well, we help our clients to grow by acquiring and retaining customers. We help our clients to deliver great user experiences, whether it's making sure their devices work in multiple languages or making sure the user guides are familiar and understandable in different contexts. We also help them communicate internally through e-learning, through colleague portals. Very comprehensive set of services. Some parts of our business, we also make sure that all of that is done while also maintaining regulatory compliance, and you'll hear Jon talking about that in our Regulated Industries division as an example. Increasingly, data is part of this journey as well.
We're gonna talk a lot today about the explosion of content that we all experience, and our clients feel that too, and quite often they come to us because we can help them digest huge amounts of content quickly and at scale, so they can decide what action to take next. When we talk about Language Weaver this afternoon, that's one of the applications of our AI technology. Let's look at it another way. As Andrew said, we're one of those businesses that no one's ever heard of, but we probably affected your day in some way already today. You might have started the day by checking your social media. We might have had something to do with the user interface that you used. You might have made an online purchase for some sportswear. We might have helped make sure that the marketing literature was localized for different markets.
You might have read a report at work today that wasn't written in your mother tongue. We might have helped to put it into your mother tongue in a way that was relevant. You might decide to go and buy a new mobile phone. We might have had something to do with making sure the user interface on that phone worked in different languages, and when it was translated from language A to language B, it fit on the screen. I won't go through all of this. You get the idea. We're proud of the small things we do for our clients that make their products and services relevant and successful. One of those lovely kinda I love these sorts of businesses, they're just kind of a little bit hidden, little bit unknown, but really make a big difference to a lot of people. Who do we work for?
This is one of the reasons I joined the business. I've worked in service businesses all my career, and this is the most high-quality customer list that I've ever worked with, and I've worked in some pretty big and successful companies. You can see the bubbles on the chart. I won't go through all of them. You've seen them many times before, but we're really proud of this, and it doesn't come easy, right? We have to win those clients every day. We have to continue to remain relevant to them. We have to make investments to make sure we're able to support them with the services they need in the parts of the world that they need us. We're good at long-term relationships. We're also increasingly well-diversified.
Top 10 are now about 30% of Group revenues, top 30 about 41%, and with our top 10, 16 years on average tenure, 13 years for the top 30. That's underpinned by really high standards of quality and customer service that we track very closely. We have very engaged customer-facing account management teams who often become almost part of the clients that they operate with. Gonna try and give you lots of examples of what we do through the course of today. I will say that many of our clients do not like us to name them specifically, so you can have a guess, but here's some more examples. Whether it's helping a large sportswear manufacturer, launch a large-scale campaign in advance of the last Olympics, or helping a global technology client make sure that the user interface on their devices work in different languages.
Whether it's helping, as we're very proud to have done in a small way, to launch new COVID vaccines through the pandemic, through linguistic validation services, which Jon will talk about. Or whether it's helping law firms with e-discovery by helping them very quickly translate huge volumes of information so they can decide where to focus and what action to take next. We'll try and give you as many examples as we can for the course of the afternoon. Where do we play? Well, this simple diagram tries to explain a little bit about where we play. If you think about content, it gets created by somebody. It often gets transformed in a number of different ways.
It gets analyzed and engaged with. It gets launched to different audiences. It gets managed through its time. It comes in lots of different forms, text, audio, video. What do we do? Everything but create the content. We don't typically do that. That's usually our clients. We can help them with the rest of this, and we will give you examples of that as we go through the course of today. Critical question. How do we view technology? Why aren't we going to be replaced by the free app on all of our mobile phones? I hope by the end of the afternoon you'll really understand why that isn't gonna happen. I'm gonna have a couple of goes at this now, and we'll give some further illustrations as we go through. I'm told there's something like 640,000 translators globally.
A good translator on average will do about 2,000 words a day, so that's about 1.3 billion words translated per day. There's apparently about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. I have no idea what quintillion is, but it's quite a big number. Now, clearly, not all of that content needs translating. Even if a small portion of it does, there aren't enough people on the planet to do the work. This industry has used technology and needed it for some time. With the expansion of content, that gap between humans and content gets bigger. That stat down the bottom there, 80% of online content is only available in 1/10 of all languages. That's a big challenge for many of our clients. Look at it a different way. We today can offer a really complete range of services.
At one end of this spectrum, humans are still the critical component. You know, people who understand patterns, people who understand the science behind those patterns, people who understand the chemistry behind new treatments. They all use technology to do their jobs, and you'll see in the demonstration outside how we blend technology with expertise. You can see our tools in action. The other end of the spectrum, the tech can do a lot of the work without much human intervention. That's where you've got huge volumes of content that need to be translated quickly to a sufficient level of quality in order to take action. That's where the AI really kicks in. Along the journey between the two, there are a whole bunch of different combinations of tech and people.
Some of the investments we're making are to make sure that our sales force can identify the right solutions for every situation along this spectrum when they're talking to our customers. There are also some applications where those things on your phones are just what you need. Good enough, not tailored to any particular industry, quick, they don't cost anything. That's great. We don't play in that space. That is not where we play. I hope by the time you've seen the demonstration of Language Weaver, you'll understand a little bit about the difference. Why do we think this business will grow? Well, we've spent quite a lot of time working with OC&C looking at the markets that we serve, and we've identified five growth drivers that we will talk about all through the course of today.
First of all, that explosion of data and content that we all experience in our daily lives. Second, increasing burden of regulation that drives a lot of the work that we do in some of our segments more than others. Continued innovation. We help our clients to take new products and services to market. We don't see that slowing down anytime soon. Growth in AI and automation is actually a critical driver of growth opportunity for us. So far from being the threat, it is also expanding the available market that we can serve by making things that weren't possible to be done by humans possible to be done through technology. Last but by no means least, and despite the slightly gloomy world we all find ourselves in these days, we're still great believers in globalization.
We still think our customers will be coming to us for help in taking their products and services into new markets. Through the course of this afternoon, in every one of the presentations, we will touch on which of these growth drivers is most important for each of our divisions. How big is our market? About GBP 47 billion, broken down as you can see. Some of those markets are likely to grow quicker than others. As I said earlier, what we're trying to do through the course of this plan is shift the business increasingly to the higher growth segments on this chart. A bit less core localization, a bit more data annotation, a bit more Regulated Industries, a bit less IP Services. Again, we'll illustrate that through the divisional presentations this afternoon. Growth rates vary across our end markets.
We're aiming to move into higher growth adjacencies, increase our exposure to life sciences, and drive a higher proportion of revenue from tech. What that means is, through the course of this plan, the weighted average market growth rate that we will be operating within moves from an average of 4% in the early years to an average of 6% in the outer years. How do we win? It's all well and good being in markets that are growing, but how do we capture that growth? Well, this is our new growth model. This is why we think we can win and grow in these segments. This is in a way what's unique about us. Again, we will refer to this model throughout the course of this afternoon. First of all, building long-term client relationships. We have a very broad range of services.
We have configurable solutions to meet whatever our clients' needs are in terms of quality, speed, and value. Got very good account management teams and deep specialist sector expertise. We're really good at language and culture. 270 language pairs supported, access to 29,000+ linguists, rich data embedded in translation memory and term bases, and if you don't know what those are, you will be before the end of the afternoon, and ongoing investment in future linguistic and technical talent. A set of products that we really think are critical to the future of the business, and we'll talk about these three through the course of the afternoon, Language Weaver, Trados, and Tridion. We'll explain how that product suite also drives the efficiency of our business.
We aim to continue to extend the footprint of the business through M&A, and we'll give you some case studies on how we've done with M&A, and we'll talk to you later about our current priorities in terms of further bolt-ons. As I've said, we're also going to talk to you about how our scale and platform can drive further efficiency and margin improvement. That's a lot about the what. I'm gonna talk a little bit now about who we are and how we behave and how we think. Matters a lot to me.
People who've worked with me a long time will often say, "Oh, Ian bangs on about how the what and the how are equally important," and I do 'cause I think they are equally important. We have just brought two large businesses together, and a number of you quite rightly asked questions of me and others about how the two businesses have come together. Look, I think they've come together pretty well, but we've really had to work at it.
One of the things we've been doing over the last few months is consulting very widely across the business about not just the strategic plan, which has actually involved about 100 of our senior leaders in putting it together, but we've also consulted with thousands of our colleagues around the world in terms of the behaviors that they associate with things when we're doing them really well, and equally, the behaviors that they see when we're messing up. The values that we're launching today are a result of thinking about that. When we're doing well, we partner. We partner with clients through the long term. We work well together across technology and services and languages through the business, and I've seen that in spades since I joined. We've always been pioneers.
There's a real sense of pride in both former SDL and former RWS and former Moravia, all the formers. There's a real sense of pride in the fact that we have broken barriers, we have led our industry, we have been pioneers. In this plan, we are going to continue to pioneer the use of technology and new ways of working to serve our clients better. We're here to solve problems. We're very positive in the way we approach things, so we progress. Whenever we get together, the purpose is to move something forward. Finally, the essence of any service business, we're here to keep our promises. If we say we'll do something, we'll do it. These aren't just words on a slide. We're launching a new code of conduct this month. They will be embedded in that code of conduct.
These values will be embedded in all of our HR processes when we're deciding whether to hire you or not, whether we're deciding whether to promote you or not, whether deciding whether you get your annual bonus or not. The values will be embedded in all our HR processes. We're really excited about this. We had huge sort of participation in this process. There's a sense of energy behind this. We've also thought about how we organize the group. Look, there's a few ways of looking at this. First of all, we really believe in customer-facing divisions. Expert teams who speak the language of their clients, who understand their industries, their contexts, and their objectives. We will continue to be organized in a divisional structure with clear P&L accountability for those divisions.
We will increasingly support those divisions by lean and effective support functions, Language eXperience Delivery team, finance, HR, legal, et cetera, and a very small head office. We'll remain focused on our clients, on growth, and on eliminating complexity wherever we can. We're also keen to embrace the future, bringing that technology and service mix together and leading the change in our industry as we always have. That magic of sort of entrepreneurial spirit that's always been in RWS, we're gonna continue to try and embrace that even though we're a bit bigger. Doing things properly, delivering at pace, solving problems once, taking the odd risk every now and again to move the business forward. We also really care about who we are more broadly. Look, there's a lot of information on this slide. There's a lot of information in our annual report.
I think the simple message from me is on the E and the G bits of ESG. I think we're doing the right things. We've set an ambitious carbon reduction goal, 55% reduction by 2030. We're reporting, I think, against all the right frameworks, and there's a real determination to deliver. We don't have a huge carbon footprint, but it's right that we do the right things. In terms of governance, while we have no plans to move to the main market, we've said we will embrace FTSE 250 standard governance, and I think we're well on the way to doing that. You've seen the changes to our board. You've seen, you know, through our annual report, a number of things we're doing in terms of governance, in terms of controls, and look, I think we're on the right track.
These things really matter, actually. Beyond mattering to all of you and your investors, it matters to our customers. If you think about the sorts of organizations we do business with, they increasingly use ESG as a way of deciding who they play with and who they don't. We are really determined to lead our industry in this area. The area where I think we get most excited about is the S. If you think about our purpose, global understanding, there's a higher purpose in there somewhere. There's something to be really proud of. If you think about why people become linguists, they are genuinely curious about other cultures. They want to help people understand each other. Increasingly, we will shape our S around that thought. Already we're doing a heck of a lot.
We have a very extensive engagement program across the world to try and attract and support young people into our industry. As Maria will explain, that's a great example of ESG win-win. It's the right thing to do. We also need those people who speak unusual language pairings to fuel our business. We are taking this seriously. Carla, our head of ESG, is here. You can talk to her in the break. This is something I think we're making great progress around. I also think it's a great way of mobilizing energy across our business. How will we get there? Well, you'll hear us talking about those investments this afternoon.
We do have some investments to make in sales enablement, in continuing to embrace that cultural and technical expertise, in our technology and AI, in leveraging our scale. There are different payback periods associated with those investments. The guidance that we've issued today reflects all of that organic investment. Of course then, there's the opportunities to use M&A to accelerate our progress towards those goals. What does success look like? This reflects what we said in our RNS this morning. In the phase one of the plan, market growth of 4%, we aim to grow in line with the market. Moving to 6% market growth in the outer years, we aim to outperform that 6% in those outer years through the investments that we're making. There will be a slight PBIT percentage reduction next year as we make some of those investments.
Recovery in 2024, and then, you know, good margin growth in the outer years as we get that operational leverage and the return on those investments. Similarly, with CapEx, we are increasing the CapEx spend. That will affect cash conversion, but you see it coming back in the outer years. We'll come back to this and talk in more detail about it later on. Final slide for me is just to orient you for the rest of the afternoon. We're gonna focus on the three divisions highlighted in yellow. We haven't got a separate presentation on IP Services because I think that is the business that most people are most familiar with, but we will be giving an update on performance in IP Services later on, and we're very happy to take questions.
Neil, who heads IP Services, is also here to take questions during the breaks. We'll be talking about Language eXperience Delivery, and we'll be talking about some of our support functions. To kick that off, I'm really delighted to introduce to you Maria, our Chief Language Officer, to talk about Language eXperience Delivery. Thank you.
Hi, everyone. My name is Maria Schnell. I head Language eXperience Delivery. We essentially produce for our divisional colleagues like Jon and Thomas, which will introduce themselves to you later on. What we do when I say we produce, we translate roughly 1.8 billion words a year. That's about 1 million projects. All of them pretty short turnaround projects. Can be anything from two hours to a week through a pretty large linguist network, a combination of external and internal linguists. I am, as you can probably hear from my accent, I live in Germany. I am a native Spanish person. I'm a linguist by trade. Never worked as a linguist, but at least I have a baseline understanding of what my team is working on and what their challenges are.
Let me get on to what you'll hear from me in the next couple of minutes. I will explain to you how we adapt our solutions to the changing needs of our clients. I'll explain to you what that means for the role of our translators, and I will show you how we will improve our delivery platform to help unleash the operational leverage opportunity that we have at our hands. Let me start by explaining to you what LXD actually stands for. Language eXperience Delivery. I'm clearly a big fan of abbreviations, so bear with me. When I say LXD, I mean Language eXperience Delivery.
We are, as I said before, the production platform, so the people, processes, and systems that are in charge of, ultimately, translating or producing for the clients that buy localization services from us. We're also the mothership of all production data. We do that because it helps us take production decisions quickly. Our world is very fast-paced. We need to take decisions quickly, and we need to have adequate information for that. We use the production data as well to help us build AI capabilities that will set us apart from our competition. We are our biggest technology customer. At the same time, we ultimately help our technology colleagues like Thomas' team or Mihai's team make their products better and more relevant for linguists and more relevant for our customers.
In the last couple of years, what we do when we translate has evolved quite a bit. Let me give you a couple of examples on what that means. When I started working as a product manager in the localization industry, I did have customers that would commission with me, translation into international Spanish, thinking that international Spanish would be good enough for anybody speaking Spanish on the planet. Today, that's not enough anymore. If people want to sell into Spain, they will translate into Gallego, Catalan, Basque, Castellano. What they will ask for if they sell into Latin American Spanish is they will go into Peruvian, Argentinian, Chilean, et cetera. Some of them actually go into expat communities as well. We have...
One of the biggest growing languages that we had in the last couple of years was Spanish for the U.S., for the United States. Some of them will even go more granular and actually ask for translations for, I don't know, the Argentinian hipster, for example. They're going really, really subcultural as well, not just very, very local. What is also changing is that our clients are venturing into more and more remote markets for multiple reasons. There is a mobile connectivity revolution. Everybody can go online even in very remote markets these days, and everybody can very quickly pay you, thanks to the mobile payment revolution as well. That opens up new markets for our customers. One thing that has opened up remote markets for our customers as well is things like the global COVID vaccination campaigns.
That is something where we really reached very far and very deep in our localization requirements. We consequently see the biggest volume growth in languages like Southeast Asian languages, Indic languages, African languages. What we know for those languages isn't really comparable to the situation that we experience in, I don't know, countries like France, Germany, Spain, for example, the concept of a conventional translator doesn't necessarily exist. You cannot study translation in some of those African countries or in some of the Southeast Asian markets. We ultimately need to take people that understand English reasonably well and have to help them become translators, have to educate them as they become translators. We also have to help them having meaningful conversations with their customers about quality.
For that, we need to establish a quality consensus. Those languages aren't necessarily always well-documented. It's not like you have something like the Académie française that explains very, very neatly what good quality looks like. That is something that we now need to look at as well. Technology does also not adequately support those casual translators. The productivity tools just don't work as well for some of those very rare languages as they do for, again, say, French. Consequently, translators cannot be as productive as that. That has had a pretty impactful impact on what translators are doing today. The role of a translator is ultimately changing.
Our in-house linguists help us finding linguists and developing them into the profile that they need to have to be successful in helping our customers reach the target group that they need to reach. They do that through their work, through RWS Campus that you've seen before, and the language labs. They help us establish and document language standards, as I've described before, so that we can have a baseline understanding with our customers on what good quality looks like for those languages. They also support those linguists becoming more productive using our tools and developing our tools, so that they can translate faster, which given how small some of those and how rare some of those languages are, can be quite a material challenge. They also make content relevant to our client, to our clients' customers.
What that ultimately means is that what normally translation is somebody wrote a text in the original, somebody else translates that, and the content is the same. That's not what we do anymore. The reason why we do that is because we have to add cultural context to make that product relevant in the target language. To give you a concrete example on what that means, one of our customers produces sports gear. In the course of the pandemic, the classic use cases stopped being relevant because gyms were closed. It's as easy as that. People were still buying sweatpants, though, but for different reasons. The question is, what are those reasons?
The customer sat down and formulated use cases, and one of the use cases they formulated was people are wearing their sweatpants as they do their home improvement projects. That's a very U.S.-based use case because people in Japan don't have the space for home improvement projects. They still wear sweatpants, though, but for different reasons. This is then what a translator does. They essentially call up the client and go, "I see what you try to do here. This will not work in that cultural context," and will make the text relevant to the right cultural context. In doing so, our translators help us coping better than anyone else in the industry with the content explosion that Ian has mentioned before, but also with the target language explosion, with that trend of becoming hyperlocal.
They help us with making content relevant. Walking away from the traditional concept of translation to true personalization that makes content meaningful to the target group that our clients are selling to. I'll explain to you later what Japanese people wear sweatpants for, by the way, if you're interested. Let me give you a high-level overview of what my team is concretely doing. On the highest possible level, we translate. It is a lot more complex than that. What that means is if you take my cell phone. I'm German, thus, my cell phone is German. A translator will have taken that cell phone, will have translated the text that is displayed on the cell phone, and will have made it German.
Another resource will look at the cell phone and make sure that the layout actually fits the space that is available on the cell phone. Another resource will play with the applications on the cell phone and make sure that as they press, as I press the equivalent of the OK button in German, the software actually does what it's supposed to do. Another person will help with making the virtual assistants better. If I have my virtual assistant on the phone, I'm German, I give German voice commands. The virtual assistant needs to understand me.
For us to get there, somebody needs to collect tons of voices of all Germans, of all genders, age groups, dialects, so that my cell phone understands me, a middle-aged German woman from the southwest of Germany, as I talk to it and ask it to do things. My team does all of that, and that's in a nutshell explain everything that you have in the breadth of service box on the left-hand side. We do that across a pretty broad market. We have a huge geographical and language coverage. We cover quite a huge breadth of subject matter, expertise areas.
To give you an example of what we define as a sector, as you have here, one sector, for example, is life sciences, which then goes into a family of sub-sectors starting from pharmaceutical, med device, et cetera, content types. We cover about 240 different sectors at this stage. We do that pretty well for two reasons. We have access to an unrivaled amount of proprietary automation options. That starts with what by now is pretty standard, so computer-aided translation tools that support the translators as they do their job. It also includes AI-enabled functionalities that help us find the right linguists or that ultimately pre-translate for the linguists, and then the linguists can focus on making things relevant.
It also includes platforms like Helix that are essentially orchestration platforms helping us organize all of our systems and processes in the background. We're also good at that because we have a pretty unrivaled access to the linguist market. As you can see here, we have a pretty huge external freelance base that we interact with, and we have a pretty significant in-house translator team as well. That in-house translator team is not subject to competitive pressures, and that in-house translator team is pretty unique in their linguist and technical capabilities and unrivaled in the market. They are the ones that enable us to ultimately develop those unique skills. Without an in-house team, it is much harder for all of our competitors.
They help us build better technologies because they use our products and generate product production data as they go, which Mihai and his team, for example, can then use to build further AI capabilities. Let me show you how we work in a quick process flow. Ultimately, it all starts with the customer-generating content. There are multiple machine steps in the middle. We have humans translating, engaging with customer reviews, adapting, and ultimately we deliver back to the customer. The whole process flow is enabled by technology from the beginning to the end. What the technology ultimately does is it helps us extract translatable text. It presents the text that is supposed to be translated in an interface where the translator essentially has the content that they have translated before at their disposal.
They also have the content that the machine has translated for them at their disposal, and they have access to, quality assurance and other productivity, features as well. Technology helps us select the right linguists, for the right content type, and it helps us recompile and deliver back to the customer. What the humans focus on in this process is, making pre-translated text relevant. The stuff that comes from the machine and the stuff that comes out of the databases is made relevant by them. I always say linguists either create beauty or compliance. They also adapt the content further beyond text, so it's not just all about text. Humans make layout changes. Again, if you take the phone examples, they will essentially beautify the interface and make sure that it looks the way it's supposed to look.
They may add voice-over to audio-video content, and they may also start a round of linguistic or functional testing, so playing with the software to make sure that it actually does what it's supposed to do and doesn't break. They also interact with client reviewers, either because they're dealing with an, I don't know, a field marketing organization in the target country to make sure that we actually hit the brand voice of the customer. Or they may interact with a subject matter expert that ensures that we meet local regulatory requirements. While all of that doesn't sound like a lot to do for humans, it is a lot to do for humans. It's predominantly a lot to do for humans because of the content explosion that Ian referred to earlier.
What that content explosion means for me is I don't have to worry. I do seriously have to worry about running out of humans on the planet. That is what keeps me up at night, which is why we've thought about initiatives like RWS Campus, for example. The use of Trados and Language Weaver actually puts me in a position to be able to do all of that with the few humans that exist on the planet. Our in-house team actually puts me in a position, not just to make those products better as they enable me, but also it helps me. They help me to develop further linguists that don't really exist on the market yet. That is pretty unique, and none of our competitors have that capability.
Let me bring that to life for you, with a technology, video.
In this overview, we show a typical translation workflow for a requestor, project manager, translator, and reviewer. RWS's translation technologies help automate and streamline the entire translation process to deliver the right blend of speed and quality. Whatever the content needs are, you will see how we use machine translation to optimize the process and combine the power of linguistic data and AI with professional translators to help companies amplify their global efforts. Let's begin in the Trados Enterprise customer portal as a requestor. The interface provides an overview of the user's projects. We start by entering project details and choosing a project template for one or more target languages. We finish by uploading files for translation. With the project created, the requestor reviews and approves a cost estimate based on the total word count for translation. Now let's log in as a project manager.
Project managers benefit from an advanced dashboard showing a list of active projects, assigned tasks, and a heat map to help highlight any projects that need attention. Looking at the newly created project, the Content Analyzer, powered by Language Weaver, indicates that the project is about electronics. Our AI also recommends the most appropriate translators for the job. After verifying all the details, the project moves to the next step in the workflow, translation. The task seamlessly appears for the translator within Trados Studio with all the relevant linguistic data pre-populated. In this example, where segments perfectly or closely match, previous human translation, stored in a database of translation memory, can be used, saving time and money. The remaining segments are automatically translated using machine translation from Language Weaver.
When linguistic data is combined like this, it means translators often start with a translated document and can devote their time to editing for context, brand tone, and nuance, all of which drive up quality. When translation is complete, the work is automatically uploaded back to Trados Enterprise. We'll return there now as a reviewer. The reviewer has a simplified interface that only lists the files available for review. However, linguistic data is still easily accessible. By providing all stakeholders with the right level of access, this data offers maximum efficiency, consistency, and quality for organizations. For example, on the left you see the term dual glass overlined in red, and on the right-hand lookup panel, the term being referenced from the terminology database. This is similar to translation memory, but displays key words instead of sentences to ensure consistency. Once the review is completed, the original requester is notified.
With features like cutting-edge linguistic AI, role-specific user experiences, built-in integration with Trados Studio, Language Weaver's neural MT, and a variety of content connectors, we offer unprecedented control, visibility, and scalability to give organizations the very best translation experience.
Okay. Let me talk to you about the future now. What we've spent time on in the last 18 months is analyzing our whole operating platform, so people, process, and systems, involved in producing at this point in time for us to understand where are we today, what do we have right now, what is working for us right now, what will make us better able to cope with the future, with that content tsunami that we are coping with. What we have come back with is, in a nutshell, we have a lot of potential already. We definitely need to do a couple of things to be able to scale better, to be ready for that next wave.
We need to also get better in reaping the benefits of our set of unique capabilities and, of our size as an organization. For that, we need to focus on automation and how we manage our supply chain, but we also need to develop a little bit more depth on some of the services and markets we cover. To get there, we need to fundamentally transform our platform so we can become the most efficient and effective language service provider on the market. If we focus for a minute on the two areas on the right, that require most focus for now, automation and how we manage our supply chain, we need to materially simplify. What I mean by that is we, from a technology perspective, we're a technology-driven, organization.
However, we've grown through acquisition and, in the context of that, have acquired a plethora of technology options to make us more productive, to run production workflows through. Thus, our core task at hand will have to be to simplify with the spirit of only solving a problem once. Helix, so what is Helix today, will help us get there, but we will have to rebuild in some areas, complement in other areas, because we're a different organization now and we have to adapt accordingly. We also need to simplify how we engage our supply chain. We're already the employer of choice for translators. We also need to become the client of choice for translators. And we need to consequently simplify how we find them, how we onboard them, and how we develop them further.
As I said before, we already have what we need to be really good at that. We just need to fully unleash the potential. We also have to centralize and standardize how we collect production data today. This will help us build more AI capabilities that will help us accelerate further, and it will help us consequently fulfill the operational leverage potential that we have as a group. Last but not least, we also need to further incubate to develop the depth in markets and services that we have at this stage, so we have to incubate new capabilities, we have to incubate rare languages and rare talent. We can do that through the work that our linguists do in RWS Campus and with our language labs.
We're uniquely placed to do all of that, given our combination of cultural expertise and technological capabilities that is unrivaled in the market. To facilitate all of that, we will drive as much volume as possible through our Language eXperience Delivery team. Language eXperience Delivery will be here to deliver the best-in-class user experience in the target language to our clients. It will also enable our divisional colleagues to focus on organic growth. This is a project that will need time, investment, and appropriate change management. We've built our plan in a way that we will focus our initial effort on generating immediate measurable savings for the group through centralizing and standardizing our production data, through being smart about how we procure work externally and smart about how we allocate work externally or internally.
The increased level of visibility that will bring will help us automate, simplify. The automation will go segment by segment, and we will prioritize the segments with the largest savings potential, as well as easy automation will go first. On the highest level, what we will do is we will change the way we interact with our linguist community, and we will drive more automation through the end-to-end process. That will take us to a place where we can fully unlock the operational leverage potential that we have as a group of our size and our unique capabilities, human and technical. Des will tell you later what that will mean concretely in numbers.
To just summarize everything I've just taken you through, we already have a great foundation, but we have to simplify to be less complex for all stakeholders, and we have a defined path to get there and to build the most efficient and effective operating model on the market. That will mean a transformation program that will run over several years, but is needed to unleash the full operational leverage opportunity we have at our hands, and is also needed to help us not only scale faster, but also make future acquisitions in the industry easier. This way, we will get the best out of our unique technical and cultural expertise while leveraging our scale and reach as a group. With that, I hand over to Jon.
Thank you, Maria.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Jon Hart. I am the President of RWS Regulated Industries. I've been with RWS for three years. Prior to the acquisition of SDL, I ran RWS Life Sciences. I'm a 20+ year veteran of this industry, the translation industry. I came up primarily through sales, so I have a very strong customer focus, very strong growth focus. It is really my pleasure to lead this division. It's an 800 person strong division that delivers technology and linguistic solutions to RWS' customers in the life science, legal, and financial spaces. We account for about 23% of group revenue. Last year, we produced GBP 163 million in revenue and 24% of group-adjusted profit, and last year we generated GBP 28 million in operating profit.
What I'm gonna talk to you today about is the great macro sort of growth environment that we operate in. I'm gonna give you an overview of our wonderful client set and the service lines that we provide for them. Then I'm gonna talk about how those service lines and that technology comes together in the customer experience of working with RI. We'll move on and we'll discuss our strategy to accelerate growth into the future. We're very fortunate to be serving markets with strong underlying growth. As mentioned earlier in this presentation, our clients are producing content and data at a record pace.
They've got increasing ESG and regulatory requirements, increasing requirements in the markets that they do business in, increasing requirements or new requirements as they get into new markets. Continued innovation. They're always developing new products and new services to take to market. The growth of AI. Yes, this is facilitating their ability to generate content in record amounts and record speed. This also gives us the ability. AI gives us the ability to keep pace with that, with them. Changing globalization market, you know, what's happening there is our customers are looking to get into new markets. There's also that extreme localization factor that Maria was talking about, so sub-markets within markets that they already do business in.
We are our customers' trusted partner, and they rely on us for speed, security, and quality, and we've earned the reputation over the years of being the trusted pair of hands that they can give their most complex and mission-critical translation projects to. We're very proud to do business with 20 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, with 19 of the top 20 med device companies, and with 18 of the top 20 law firms. Our secret sauce or the way that we engage with customers is that we listen deeply. We really try to understand our customers' needs, and then we develop solutions around those needs. If we do that well, we're extremely successful, and I think that you can judge that by these relationships we've had with our customers that have grown over many years. Many of these relationships are 10 years or more.
Some are close to 20 years old. We have a great life sciences offering. It's truly class-leading. We're experts in the localization of regulatory filing for medical devices and pharmaceuticals. These are things like centralized procedure filings. That's the legal documents that need to be filed to get a drug into the European Union across all the different countries within the European Union. Also, marketing authorization applications. These are regulatory filings to ensure that drugs do what the marketing says that they're going to do. We have a unique and a very fast-growing linguistic validation business that helps our customers produce multilingual clinical outcome assessments. Then we help our customers format and publish the multilingual content that we help them produce.
The content that we translate through our machine translation systems helps to train those engines even more so that we can produce and translate at greater speed with greater consistency and greater quality. We have a highly specialized pool of linguists, and as Ian mentioned before, they're really qualified in two ways. They're excellent translators. They're also deep subject matter experts on either pharmaceuticals or med device. Some are even medical doctors. We produce all of this through a secure and auditable process to meet customers' regulatory requirements. Our customers view us as part of the medical supply chain, and as such, we are audited by our customers as part of that supply chain. This last piece is extremely important, our ability to be able to have our processes audited, stand up to customer scrutiny.
It again is an important strength of ours. Regulated Industries customers need secure end-to-end solutions that meet the needs of their regulated markets. What we do is we combine RWS technology such as Trados and Language Weaver with our deep linguistic capabilities to provide solutions that give our customers speed to market and industry-leading quality and consistency. This is all delivered through secure platforms that are backed up by controls that can comply with the latest standards, regulations, and certifications. I'd like to share with you how this all comes together for our clients. RWS is very proud to play a supporting role in helping to bring COVID vaccines to the world. We work with all the major players that were engaged in developing vaccines. Time was of the essence, obviously, in this project.
Our customers came to us to help roll out in very fast time vaccines to over 130 countries around the world. We did this by spinning up bespoke platforms and processes to meet increased security requirements to protect the cutting-edge IP of those vaccines. We developed acceleration strategies that we were able to leverage that help reduce delivery time on COVID materials by up to 60% in some cases. We used the scale of our language delivery platform to qualify additional linguists to be able to help with this workload, particularly in the area of vaccine safety. We've never tried to vaccinate the world all at once before.
This was very critical, particularly in terms of helping our customers identify and process adverse events through clinical studies or the early days of the vaccine rollout. Now, I wanna share with you a quote from one of our customers. This is from the head of regulatory quality oversight at a very large pharma. From seamlessly integrating with our systems when our partnership first began to creating a whole new workflow specifically for our COVID-19 projects, RWS has always listened and responded attentively to our need. This goes back to what I said before, our secret sauce, deep listening to get deep understanding to develop targeted solutions. We have a very strong business, and we've got an opportunity to accelerate that business through some key investments.
Our linguistic validation business is the fastest-growing part of Regulated Industries. We can accelerate that growth by investing in building out capacity as well as in process automation technology. Through investing in our production platform, in technology products as well as in sales and marketing, we can add new accounts and grow our existing customers in our life sciences regulatory business, and these investments can also be leveraged for further growth in clinical operations. When it comes to M&A, we're looking for life sciences-focused LSPs, language service providers. The qualification there for us is that they can either bring a strategic relationship that we currently do not have, or a capability that we do not have, such as eTMF or electronic trial master file services.
This is the ability essentially to manage the regulatory content for clinical trials and for the launch of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. We also will benefit from the investments that are being made across the wider group. Leveraging our Language Delivery platform will give us deeper resources and also help us reduce cost. The automation that we'll bring across all of our RWS systems will certainly help our business. Then we're also looking as we develop our technology stack for further functionality that is targeted towards regulatory markets. That'll help us grow our business and bring unique solutions to our customer set. Finally, just the key takeaways. Our market is a good market.
It's structurally high growth, and we serve a truly exceptional set of clients. Our expertise and our technology deliver uniquely against those client needs, again, back to the deep listening and deep understanding that we strive for in our customer relationships, and we have a clear and focused plan to accelerate growth.
Hello. My name is Estefania. I'm from Spain. I translate from English into Spanish, and my favorite phrase is que me quiten lo bailao, which means literally that they can take away from me any dance I've ever done. Anyone could say this phrase when they are making the most of their life, and if they would die tomorrow, they would have enjoyed every second of it. Any book from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie because she is so inspiring that it would be an honor to translate her. Sobremesa, which is that moment after having lunch when Spanish people stay sitting at the table while digesting their food and chatting and drinking coffee. This sobremesa can last from 15 minutes until endless hours because it has no end actually, and it's a great tradition, mostly at the weekends, when having lunch could be longer than during working days.
Intimidad. That means privacy. I think the world is becoming less private and more open. We live with technology as it becomes smarter and more evolving. I don't think we will be able to enjoy privacy, that intimacy, in the future as we know it right now. I was in high school, and we were studying ancient Greek and Latin, and we were translating a lot of Greek texts about mythological stories, and I thought, "Oh my God, these stories are so interesting. I really want to know more. I want to translate them all so I can understand them." Yeah, I didn't know I wouldn't stop translating afterwards. My family thought it was about interpreting every language in the world in conferences and European Union institutions, but nothing could be further from the truth.
It's the essence of who we are and who we want to become. I think it's the most powerful tool for human beings, so it is really interesting and important.
Good afternoon. My name is Thomas Labarthe. I'm the President of Language Services and Technology, and I'm gonna host this second part. I am an engineer by trade. I've been in the software industry for more than 20 years. I joined the group back in 2016. I'm French born, British citizen, and married to a Spanish lady, so I feel quite at home at RWS. Let's have a look at the agenda. I'll start with Language Services, and then we're gonna focus on our tech portfolio with Language Weaver first with Mihai. I'll cover Trados and Tridion, and then we will go to M&A with Christopher, group financials with Des, and Ian will wrap up before the final Q&A.
Language Services, we're a true leader in that market, being basically, you know, having more than GBP 380 million of revenue in FY 2021, a very enviable list of top global brands. This is 46% of the group revenue, and then you have GBP 47 million of operating profit, roughly 40% of the overall group profit. My objective for the session, I am first gonna articulate our client segments and service offering. We will look at the market dynamics. I will explain to you how we differentiate through the combination of our people expertise and our technology, and finally, we will look at the key organic growth drivers that we have selected for the business. Language Services benefit from positive demand drivers.
There is, as Ian explained earlier, a combination of content explosion as well as a competitive marketplace. Definitely technology and in particular AI and automation play an absolutely key role here. Some may see this as a threat. We actually see this as a true competitive advantage because it is part of our DNA, both people as well as product capabilities, and it is actually a barrier to entry for less-equipped competitors. There are some very positive trends also in globalization, where enterprises are increasingly going towards more personalization of their content and hyper-localization of their content, which also sustain opportunities. It's a large market, GBP 30 billion, 2% annual growth rate.
This being said, there are definitely sub-segments that are growing much faster, and here as an example, is data annotation, which is a new class of services to basically train AI engines. It is critical because in AI, algorithms are very often shared by people, but then it's really the product engineering talent and then data that makes a difference. This is a big opportunity growing much faster, at 20% per annum. As Andrew said in his introduction, we have a very enviable set of, clients, you know, customer base to die for, were his words, with 90 of the top 100 global brands. Let me break down these clients into three categories. Our first tier are our large tech enterprises, which represent half of our business.
This is an area where, in particular with the acquisition of Moravia, we have built a unique expertise and set of capabilities to serve these clients, build some very customized delivery solutions for them, and we are frankly also learning from them as we go. They drive also innovation together with us, and it's a very, very positive combination or relationship. We are preferred partners, preferred supplier, with most of them and considered a true partner. We then have a set of major accounts across several industries, e-commerce, retail, automotive, electric vehicles more recently, with equally long-lasting relationships there. Then we are growing increasingly in the mid-market, and this is the segment that we call go global accounts, where we intercept fast-growing companies as well as unicorns.
Interestingly, as these clients also mature, we can move them across a more enterprise delivery model. As an example, Jaguar Land Rover in the U.K. actually started as a go global account and is now one of our major enterprise accounts. What is special about us in this segment? I call that extreme quality at extreme scale. We have the capacity to address the largest network of linguists, as we saw before, but we have also learned to set up curated crowds of people, of specialists for specific solutions for our clients. We know how to deliver across all content types, and we actually focus on high-value services. We also know, because we have a very broad set of clients, how to select the best fit delivery model for them.
Huge scale also means being able to work at very small scale. It's counterintuitive, but if you take a company like Nike, for instance, their e-commerce website is updated constantly, 24/7. This means more content, but actually smaller drops of very urgent content. This is, you know, this type of continuous localization is something where we're absolutely experts. How are we differentiating ultimately? Well, besides the very broad range of linguistic capabilities that we have, we mentioned before 270 language pairs, we have increasingly broadened our portfolio of services to also cover multimedia, as an example, you know, video content, audio content, e-learning.
We're also capable of doing quality assurance, linguistic testing, and as I mentioned, we have also built capabilities in data annotation that we have field-tested and delivered at scale with our large tech clients. This is where we have both a combination of our AI skills as well as multilingual skills, which creates a very competitive offering. The so what is that, thanks to this very rich and ever-expanding portfolio, we ultimately can protect our prices and our margin better versus competitors that are more commoditized. You see this also when you look at the type of work that we do for our clients.
We are strategically positioned with them in their efforts to acquire and retain their own clients, in how they deliver user experiences, how they derive insights and intelligence from their own data and business when it is multilingual. Finally, we're also increasingly supporting their own ESG journey. To give a couple of examples here, we were recently commissioned by a Fortune 500 company to do a diversity and inclusion study for them to help them develop more gender-neutral and inclusive language internally within their company and also externally with their own stakeholders. Not the type of thing that you necessarily think about when you hear translation, but this kind of cultural consistency is where we have also deep expertise.
You know, another example, the number one home furniture company, another one that we can't name, commissioned us to help them develop e-learning courses in multiple languages around circularity and sustainability, which is absolutely key for them. We love working on these types of projects. A final one with one of our top four tech clients, around accessibility. We have developed a solution to embed sign languages into video materials that they have, and they've been quite impressed with our capacity to come up very quickly with this type of solution, which ultimately creates stickiness. All of this is always enabled by technology, and there was an interesting question before, right? Technology for us is not just the products that we have, it's also our expertise and our DNA.
If we go back to the three tiers of clients, and if I start with large tech enterprises, these clients have their own software tools, as you would expect. This being said, thanks to our understanding of software and technology, we've been able to build those customized and tailored integration into their systems. They're obsessed with efficiency themselves, and we've been able to actually positively contribute and partner there. It's not always about just the product, it's also what you do with it. Sometimes it's also about our capacity to work with other people's product, and this is part of our secret sauce. In our major accounts, we definitely have built more of a solution offering with, you know, configurable solutions with seamless integrations capabilities. The sort of lower touch, you know, go global.
Here it's really ease of use, high automation, very standard and fast turnaround to deploy a new client. This also clearly helps our team, you know, that tech-enabled proposal, because this is how we drive further speed and efficiency. You will see Mihai will talk about something called Content Analyzer, which is our capacity to ultimately also, you know, understand what is the content that we get from a client and route it to the best workflow automatically. Finally, all these represents, you know, tools that we have to again remain competitive without compromising margin. Let me put this into context with a concrete client example. This is a global electronics conglomerate, and they have actually asked us. We've been working with them for many years, but they've asked us to handle all the localization of their marketing content.
High value, you know, website banners, campaigns, videos, et cetera. This is where culture is so important. You know, it's not so much about translation, it's more we talk about transcreation, it's how do you ultimately make those marketing messages stick in a given culture? You know, the results concretely are that this client has managed to increase their sales and customer loyalty through our partnership, and you can see it in the quote, you know, they consider us a member of their team ultimately, which is what we strive for. Another example with Coca-Cola Europacific . We had only a very small engagement with them initially on one part of the Trados portfolio. They were doing localization in a very scattered way across multiple small agencies in their different markets and could not cope with it anymore.
They reached out. We designed with them a solution with services, but also supported by both Trados and Language Weaver, and that resulted in a significant reduction of admin time and cost for them, but also an improvement in the quality of the translations and also the tone of voice, and, you know, the terminology used across their business and across those 42 markets. Same thing here, you know, they highlight the high level of service, which is again, what is really important for us. Here is our focused plan. Number one, we clearly have the objective to grow faster than market.
As Ian mentioned earlier, we want to do this through investment in our go-to market, you know, sales enablement, how do we increase share of wallet within our existing accounts, as well as how do we capture new accounts in a more effective way. Tech-enabled localization is obviously a key part of our proposal. With regards to the organic growth extensions, we selected three data annotations where we have a real right to win there and some differentiation. E-learning within the overall multimedia localization, this is where we have a very strong expertise and a lot of client wins already. Obviously the pandemic has changed the way we all learn and the way companies engage with their clients. This is really a very exciting area.
Finally, the self-service proposal for the go global mid-market segment. We will obviously look at potentially accelerating any of the above through acquisitions. So we obviously benefit from the wider group. We spoke before about how we leverage our language delivery capabilities in the tech portfolio. I also want to mention that increasingly, we collaborate with my fellow division presidents to address the different buckets of content for a client. Because you may have a non-regulated enterprise that actually has some regulated content that needs to be managed or patents, and this is something that we want to increasingly drive across the group.
Key takeaways, hopefully you better understand the richness and the diversity of the services that we offer, as well as the different tiers of clients and how we look for the best fit model for each of them. The focus on very clear growth segments, how tech and expertise really provide differentiation and ultimately, you know, we feel very confident about our plan to execute. All right, let's switch gear now and focus on technology. A brief overview of the overall Language and Content Technology portfolio. Last year, it represented GBP 100 million of sales, GBP 23 million of operating profit, you know, 14% of group revenue, 19% of group adjusted operating profit. The portfolio is divided into three segments.
We have machine translation and linguistic AI with Language Weaver, all the translation management and productivity tools that support Language Services with Trados, and finally, content management. I want to mention something about content management because there's always been some question around this space. Ultimately, content needs to be authored somewhere, you know, in the source language and needs to be managed there. Having tools to ultimately handle the life cycle of the source content provides us with a unique position to have strategic discussions with our clients, with regards to their content supply chain, and ultimately also link that downstream to all the capacities and capabilities of the group. This definitely has some space in our portfolio.
The strategy for technology overall is, number one, simplifying our portfolio, especially as we're increasingly going towards cloud solutions, which drives obviously SaaS revenues. Focus on clear growth markets as opposed to being dispersed across too many targets, and finally, through that, reestablishing leadership positions. Mihai will first take you through linguistic AI and machine translation.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mihai Vlad. I head up Language Weaver, and over the past five years, I've overseen its transformation into a growing AI business. I'm Romanian by birth, I'm British by choice, and I just learned last week that I'm half Scottish following my marriage with a gorgeous Scottish lady. Leaving aside my questionable nationality, I'm firmly and definitely rooted in technology with a lot of background in cybersecurity and machine learning. What we're gonna be talking about today will be four things. First of all, what is Language Weaver? What business problems does it solve? Secondly, what markets it's operating in. Thirdly, what makes it unique in those markets? Then fourthly, how it interacts with the rest of the group and how it benefits the group as a whole.
Before we dive into these four elements, I just want to step back a bit, and that bit is 20 years when Language Weaver started. It started with a group of researchers in Los Angeles who wanted to honor the legacy of Warren Weaver, hence the name Language Weaver. Warren Weaver was considered, or is considered the grandfather of machine translation. What those scientists did differently is instead of programming or micromanaging the algorithms with linguistic rules, they let the algorithms learn by themselves the patterns in different languages just by letting them observe pre-translated text. That was the birth of applying machine learning to a translation task. Obviously, over the past 20 years, the technology has evolved tremendously. We have right now neural networks with billions of parameters just for one language combination.
Around these, around this core technology, we developed two products. One is a software as a service or SaaS product, multi-region, multi-tenant, large scale, and the other one is an atomic version of the same product, which can be installed in various places behind firewalls, for maximum levels of security. Both products are being designed for enterprises and government organizations. What business problems do they ultimately solve? How do we help our customers? The majority of the revenue, actually 95% of the revenue comes from solving three big problems: first, content extraction, helping text analytics tools to become multilingual, and thirdly, speeding up the localization process. I'll focus on the first, with a story. Imagine, you check your email, receive an investment proposition, you open it up, it's an attachment, open it up, it's in Korean.
Unless you speak Korean, you've got a bit of a problem. What do you do? Well, you've got two choices. You can find the localization professional in your firm, if you can find them, but they will take a bit of time to get the return material back. Or you can use a free translation tool that Ian was just mentioning. If you do that, you probably are in breach of your company's privacy policy. Neither are good options. There is a third option, which is Language Weaver.
We ultimately offer a secure alternative to these free translation tools, and not only do we translate almost instantly, I definitely suggest to try out the demo on the left side and reach for Bart, but we do that instantly, but we do this while also maintaining the richness and the formatting of those PDFs, PowerPoints, and Excel files. So that's the first use case. The second use case is related to what intelligence analysts do day in, day out. Ultimately, they want to extract information from open source intelligence feeds. What's happening is they don't speak all the languages, and yet they have to analyze, I don't know, in this case, Russian or Ukrainian or Romanian feeds. Even their tools are not equipped to analyze all this information in real time in multiple languages.
What we do at Language Weaver, we ultimately make these systems multilingual. We enable intelligence analysts and intelligence professionals and text analytics tools become multilingual by pre-translating the content in the language of choice. The last but not least, as Maria mentioned, we make a localization process faster by pre-translating the content so that linguists ultimately focus on polishing and fine-tuning that language for that cultural awareness. These are the top three use cases where the plan is focused on. There is 5% of the revenue with emerging use cases which we are actively exploring right now and we're happy to talk about in the break about this. Thomas mentioned Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. They actually use the first and the third use case.
They use Language Weaver as a portal, and they also use the Language Weaver technology to speed up their localization process. For the middle use case, I have probably one of my favorite case studies, probably one of my favorite customers, which I think is very relevant for the audience we have got here. It is a globally renowned financial information company. Leaving aside the cryptic name, you might have actually used today the information they provide to financial analysts and to investors alike. What's happening is that sometimes we need to make investment decisions based on information that is coming from RNSs or annual reports from stock exchanges in China or in Japan. How do we do this?
Well, this organization is able to pre-translate or translate this content while asking Language Weaver to truly adhere to the specifics of the domain of the financial language domain. Words like leverage would mean something very different in mechanical terms versus financial terms, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. They care about accuracy, but what they care most is actually speed. Sometimes the traffic spikes to 20,000 words per minute. 20,000 words per minute means approximately spinning up 4,800 translators, almost like in an instant. Then as the traffic dies down, pretty much having an elastic system that scales down to the required traffic. This elasticity and this flexibility into the system is what this organization cares about. Ultimately, what's the so what here?
Well, investors and financial analysts can make faster decisions because all that financial intelligence and then financial information can reach them faster than maybe their competitors. This is how this organization benefits from Language Weaver. Now, this is not the only customer. We actually are blessed to have a wide array of customers in varied sectors. Now, the company was born around the government organizations 20 years ago, and this is where we're firmly rooted, and this is where the brand is very, very recognized. The business has evolved tremendously within the enterprise domain. We moved it from government to also cover enterprise. Specifically, I think we've seen traction in the Regulated Industries, as Jon was mentioning, so in finance, legal, and life sciences.
I'll give you an example of a customer who actually went on a journey from starting with a use case where they needed to make their e-discovery or electronic discovery process multilingual. This is a law firm that had to deal with a multinational case, and obviously those emails and those documents were not just in one single language. We helped them find the needle in the haystack by removing the language barrier. The Chief Information Officer realized, hang on a second, maybe the employees in this organization can use Language Weaver as a portal. We provided them secure translation. Once they translated those documents, as you'll see in the demo outside, some people realized, hang on a second, this is the precise document that I want professionally reviewed. We made it incredibly easy for them.
At the click of a button, press a button, and together with Trados Enterprise, we integrated a system that document is securely teleported inside RWS. We securely translate it, then polish it, and we send it back. Ultimately, three use cases into one, and this is how the business is evolving around Regulated Industries. I think what's unique about this blend of products and services is that Language Weaver is not just bringing in technology revenues, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's ultimately strategically placed to pull through services and linguistic services revenue that otherwise would not be accessible through other means. Okay. Enough about the problems and enough about the solutions. What makes Language Weaver unique? What makes Language Weaver unique is ultimately a secret around artificial intelligence.
The reality is, especially in linguistic tasks, you cannot have one single AI model that can do everything, translating every language and across every domain. When our customers want us to improve the quality of this AI model, we have a choice of running really fast and improving this generic model, or we can focus it on a specific domain, their domain, their language, their particular lingo that they use inside their company. This adaptation is fairly unique because it requires a great deal of AI research expertise, which we have, and a great deal of linguistic expertise, which we also have in RWS. Together, we're actually able to go further, to go this extra mile than pure technology players can do and thereby solving the customer problem.
Look, sometimes those customers cannot offer us access to their data or allow us to fine-tune these algorithms. What we have to do is something akin to encapsulating all that complexity into something atomic, into something that even they can use behind the firewall without sharing any training data with us. A good metaphor for that is like we have here a video or an AV team, which is operating complex equipment with lots of controls and whatnot. At the same time, you can derive a fairly good video stream from a smart device like this with access to fewer controls. There is a great deal of engineering that went into engineering this smart device. This is precisely what we did at Language Weaver.
We took all that complexity, and we built these adaptive models or self-adaptive models that ultimately lead us to have a smart machine translation product. By the way, MT is machine translation. I forgot to mention this at the beginning. That choice was very precise. We wanted to build a premium product for our markets, not a niche product, not a cheap product, but a premium product. This is probably the first or the most important pillar that sets us unique in our market. We're lucky to have as part of RWS, the trifecta of being fairly unique and defending our business in especially in the Regulated Industries and in the government space. I'll give you some examples of some of our competitors.
We could have big technology players who offer access to an API, but that's not enough. Sometimes you have to adapt this technology to whatever the customer or the language domain there is required. This is where adaptation and linguistic expertise and the AI research that we bring to our customers sets us apart. This is where this last mile comes in. When this is not enough, we can bring the human linguist to complete that last mile. We also have upstarts that focus and they're really good on specific languages. Large enterprises and multinational financial institutions ultimately cannot take this technology and roll it out across 10,000 or 20,000 employees. We have that scalability that's been built across 20 years.
If the product is good enough to withstand the pressures of a government organization, it will definitely take on the pressures of a financial one. Thirdly, we have some of our competitors are language service providers who can bring that linguistic expertise, but the reality is that they use technology off the shelf. They do not have their proprietary technology. They do not look into the future. They don't know how to adapt this. We're unique. We're really well-positioned and really defending our position in the market. We're also benefiting from strong tailwinds in the markets we operate. With the growth in content, the need for translating it only grows. That correlates linearly with our business.
Secondly, the fact that the regulation requirements are being phased in going forward actually plays really into the hands of Language Weaver because this is where we have a lot of traction within the Regulated Industries, and security and data privacy and scalability are becoming more and more important. Thirdly, as technology evolves further, and it does, the way it helps Language Weaver is because it allows more use cases to benefit from the application of AI. Things that we cannot imagine right now where machine translation is applicable or other natural language processing, what new technologies are, will be accessible to us going forward. We are operating in a market of GBP 3 billion with a considerable growth year-on-year of 20%. What are we planning to do with all this?
We have strong product market fit, strong tailwinds behind us. What we want to do is to kickstart and spin up the go-to-market engine. We want more reach, and we want more presence and more awareness about Language Weaver. We don't want this to be a hidden secret for specific law firms and some government organizations. We want people to know about this. It is important for us to be present and integrated with other systems, develop our partners network. We have a considerable amount of our revenue is coming from through partnerships and channels. Second thing, as Thomas mentioned, we want to boost our go-to-market engine, and boost our marketing spend. Then thirdly, we want to carefully and precisely identify adjacent use cases, and one of them is actually being demoed outside. It is multilingual summarization.
You should definitely try this out. This is something fairly unique that puts Language Weaver further than translating. It gets us to extracting those pieces of insight that Ian was mentioning. With all that said, we want to build a sustainable flywheel. We want to build a sustainable growth model. I mentioned this adaptability of value-added service and working together with our linguistic experts in Maria's organization. That actually has an extra benefit. It actually makes the product more relevant to our customers, and it makes the product thereby stickier. How does it do that? By tailoring the product and the offering to the specifics of the customer, the quality increases, but just for that customer.
The more feedback is being fed into the models and the more data is being used to train the models, the better the fit for that product to that customer. What's happening is ultimately we will have a higher stickiness, and we know that the best way to make money is not to lose money, thereby the revenues will recur more effectively. Ultimately, we want to invest these recurring revenues in boosting our go-to-market engine and expanding our partnerships or reinvesting it in growth. To bring it all up, while this is a virtuous circle that we're building for Language Weaver as a technology business, Language Weaver is more than a fast-growing technology business. It is ultimately a beacon of innovation inside RWS. It goes two ways.
Thomas mentioned the Content Analyzer. This is a technology that we developed to ultimately extract, strip all the metadata that's coming through the through our production line and almost like provide an X-ray scan for the content prior to it being translated. We'll know the domain, the complexity, the who would actually be suited to translate this content. We went a step further, and you'll experience this in the breakout area. We're also trying to predict and tell our translators how good we think the translation is. We went further to almost like score how good the machine translation is prior to them starting, which is giving us a unique expertise or a unique insight into pricing. We know how much effort will actually go into all this.
There's definitely a symbiotic relationship because the same way as linguists help us make a better fit for our model, the same way as we give back technology to the group to ultimately make the Language Services more efficient and the rest of the products more competitive. I hope that I remove the mystique around what Language Weaver does, how it's being uniquely positioned in the market, where we're planning to invest to truly boost its growth, and ultimately how it fits within the grand scheme of things and how it interacts with the rest of the group. Thank you so much. Now over to Thomas again.
Thank you, Mihai. A very exciting space. Let's cover language technologies now with Trados. As you saw in the previous cases, we want to first focus on what is exactly our product suite here and the use case that we serve, market dynamics, where we're gonna invest for growth. Maria showed a video with the overall workflow of translation and basically the Trados portfolio serve these three core use cases that we saw previously. Number one, the overall management of the translation workflow and process. You know, this is where our clients can interact with us, send us content. This is where project managers are handling that content and where a lot of the software automation also happens. We facilitate collaboration between teams, typically between translation teams as well as reviewers.
Finally, we improve the productivity of the translators themselves. Process management, collaboration, and translation productivity. Language technologies benefit also here from positive demand drivers. I'll highlight one, by the way. There was a good question from the webcast about how do we protect our client content. Here, clearly there is an increase in the need for rigorous standards and processes alongside this type of translation work. Data governance is very important. While these types of features that are provided by our technology are immersed in regulated industries, they are actually fast becoming a need across all types of industries. It is a smaller market versus others that you've seen before, but let me highlight again that this is absolutely key and strategic to power our services across the entire group.
We have a very broad customer base here also, and there are three main categories of buyers. You have corporate enterprises that typically consume the three use cases that we saw before. We have language service providers that are typically more buying collaboration solutions as well as translation for their own sort of individual translators. Look, this is an area where we have a long experience of that type of competition. Yes, we compete with a lot of these LSPs, but it doesn't prevent us to also collaborate with them on technology. Prior to the acquisition of SDL, RWS was actually one of our big clients for Trados. Finally, you know, freelancers themselves buy Trados for computer-assisted translation.
From a go-to-market standpoint, we either bundle the technology with our services, or we sell it direct. Let me show you how our language technology really helps with the agility of our clients. Paula's Choice is an incubator brand from Unilever. They are growing really, really fast, and they were struggling to basically keeping up with all the needs, the requirements to launch new markets, new geographies. We've partnered with them and set up the language technology in only two days, including an integration with their own Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This has really shortened the lead time to launching new markets for them. As you can see in the quote here again, you know, teamwork, as well as the fact that they consider this technology as an absolute must-have to their own expansion plans.
As Ian introduced before, you know, being a leader in that market for several decades now and with our history of acquisitions, our portfolio in language technology was quite complex, with a lot of different products, as you can see on the left-hand side here. We've been investing over the past few years in ultimately building a modern cloud-native platform upon which we can deploy the three core use cases that we just saw. We're undergoing that transition, which is key. Importantly, I feel that now with the investment that we have already made and the ones that we're planning for the next few years, we have the capacity to leapfrog the market.
You know, yes, you had smaller players that were cloud native that came in, did not have the type of customer base that we have. It's much easier to get started. However, it's very hard for them also to grow and past a certain threshold in terms of size. That's where now I feel that with this strong cloud-based platform, we have actually accelerate the pace of innovation in this market. We are undergoing now that transition of the legacy products of our clients that were feature-rich but hard to deploy in some cases or maintain towards the cloud products with all the added benefit in terms of, you know, not having to worry about upgrades, maintenance. For us, it provides higher quality SaaS revenues.
We already have roughly 25% of our revenue in this space on SaaS, and we definitely plan to continue accelerating that. As I said before, it provide us also with a renewed competitiveness, and it also makes for a much stronger tech-enabled service proposition. Here is our focused plan. Number one, you know, reestablishing this competitive advantage, as I said, and starting the migration of our clients while we are also accelerating new wins. In the third phase of the plan is where we can see higher growth of revenue as well as ultimately increased margin, thanks to the retirement of the legacy products and ultimately falling CapEx as a result. I hope this helps connect the dots with what you heard before.
We definitely believe we have a very strong and compelling product suite in language technologies right now. We're very clear on where we're investing, and we have done a very strong simplification of our proposition, because we believe in this market standalone, but also because it is a critical component to our services portfolio. Let me finish now with content technologies. Same structure as before. One additional point, I also want to introduce the exciting news from this morning of our latest acquisition of Fonto Technologies. Portfolio structure. We have a long history of providing technical content management software to the aerospace and defense industry, with our product suite called Contenta. We have ultimately gained some really game-changing clients over the past few years with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.
We have a lot of strength here. There are many opportunities in this segment, and we're ultimately reviewing our strategy to see how we can ultimately maximize the opportunity in that space, but we have a very strong position currently. In web content management, we have Tridion Sites, which has also a big array of long-lasting Fortune 500 clients. We're very strong here where clients need to deploy a web infrastructure across multiple countries and in multiple languages. Where we see actually the highest opportunity for growth and ultimately a true competitive advantage is in what we call structured content management. This is where this acquisition of Fonto combined with our Tridion Docs solution really creates a very exciting opportunity. Let me explain what it is about. We call it the future of documents.
Forrester, by the way, wrote a very interesting report on the topic. There is a industry, you know, pan-industry shift that is happening right now, moving away from monolithic documents that are authored manually, prone to errors, towards a much more modular and reusable set of smaller chunks of content that can ultimately then be optimized for digital delivery or even machine consumption. You know, this movement started in manufacturing and in high tech and is really now gaining steam in Regulated Industries, you know, life sciences and financial services in particular. If we go back to the examples that Jon shared for regulatory submissions, you know, there are lots of documents that need to be authored, and currently they're done in PDFs. The reality is regulators don't have enough humans to ultimately analyze and vet all these contents.
There is a need to ultimately move towards this model that allows for a much better governance of content and ultimately make it, as I said, digestible both by humans and by machines. One thing also that is important, we tend to think about documents still in terms of text files. The reality is, increasingly, documents must have a context. They have metadata. They have also multimedia objects. Ultimately, this transformation is definitely a must and, as I said, is really happening right now in Regulated Industries. This market ultimately benefits for very strong demand drivers. Obviously, the regulatory requirements, explosion of data, AI is absolutely critical here. And it is a large market and a great opportunity for us. Let me give you a concrete example.
We have actually deployed this solution with one of the big four auditor firms in the world. Many of you may have started your careers as auditors, so, you know, that could sound familiar. Ultimately, they were really struggling with, on one hand, the disjointed process of assembling documentation and material for audits combined with fast-changing standards and regulation. That ultimately led to a very significant business risk for them. We ultimately built, together with them, a live auditing solution where auditors can ultimately have their content contextually filtered to their needs for this particular audit. They can then benefit from modern cloud-based authoring tools to ultimately assemble and build the audit itself. That's really where Fonto plays. Finally, we have actually also deployed machine translation and language technology for audits that happen in a multilingual context.
As you can see, a fairly clear return on investment, and we not just gained a trusted partnership here, but also referrals that we're deploying across other companies and sectors right now. Fonto is not a sort of new entity for us. They provide the what I call the tip of the spear. It's the web-based authoring environment in which both technical, but also, as I said now, you know, people in pharma or financial services are ultimately creating structured documentation. We have actually embedded their software into our Tridion Docs product already more than three years ago. We've had time to test that partnership and innovate together. And we believe that now having them part of the RWS family, we can truly be in that position to define the future of documents.
Hopefully here again, you know, it will provide clarity on the innovative proposition that we have combining Tridion and Fonto. We're positioned for growth, and it is definitely a compelling part of our group story. Thank you, and let me hand over to Chris.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Christopher Lewey. I'm the Group Corporate Development Director. I've been with the group now for about two years, but in fact, I already knew the group pretty well as I acted as a consultant at the time of the Moravia acquisition back in 2017. In the next 10 minutes, I'm going to cover, first of all, RWS' impressive historic track record in M&A. Secondly, I'm going to describe our clear priorities for future acquisitions, and I'll also set out the criteria we will use to ensure that we remain disciplined in our approach to M&A. Now, RWS has been an active acquirer since its IPO and has, until today, completed 16 acquisitions, and a number of those are highlighted on this slide.
There are among these some bolt-ons, but since 2015, with the acquisition of CTi, there is a trend towards some increasing scale. The acquisition of Fonto, which Thomas has covered just now, represents the 17th acquisition. All of our divisions have participated in this M&A, and you can see acquisitions in each of IP Services, in Regulated Industries, in Language Services and Localization, and latterly, a number with a technology angle. The effect of these acquisitions has been to transform RWS in terms of both the breadth and the diversity of its revenues. In divisional terms, RWS has gone from primarily an IP Services business back in 2015 to one today where IP Services is now around 15% of our revenues.
The balance is well spread with Language Services just under half of revenues, Regulated Industries around a quarter, and technology primarily acquired with SDL about 15%. In geographical terms, RWS now generates approximately 1/3 of its revenues from U.K. and Europe, down from 2/3 back in 2015, and the U.S. is just under 50%. The rest of the world, which is mostly Asia, is around 10%. M&A has fundamentally changed both the shape and the scale of RWS over the last few years. On the next two slides, I'm going to give two very different examples of effective M&A that has been undertaken by RWS.
Our Regulated Industries Division, which is now, as Jon has described, a leading global operator with an enviable client list, healthy margins, and good growth prospects, has been built by a series of seven acquisitions, including two where we have carved out the Regulated Industries element from a larger acquisition in the case of Moravia and SDL. While it's been built by acquisition, this division has also shown strong organic growth with an underlying average growth rate in the high single digits over the last five years. By contrast, SDL was RWS' single largest acquisition completed in November 2020. This combination has brought a number of strategic advantages for RWS, which have already been mentioned by my colleagues. We have roughly doubled the scale and the delivery capacity of the group.
Thomas has illustrated, this is absolutely crucial for servicing the largest global customers. We've acquired some important technology assets with capabilities in both language and in content. As described by Maria, we have the LXD platform now offering a unique resource for our clients and the prospect for operational leverage going forward. We've also delivered on the objectives set out at the time of the acquisition, which are on the left-hand side of this slide, and in particular in financial terms. In FY 2021, earnings per share grew by an impressive 20%. In terms of synergies, the run rate target of GBP 15 million by the end of FY 2022 was exceeded by more than 100% and one year early.
In addition, these synergies were delivered at a one-off cost of GBP 10.5 million, compared with an estimate at the time of the acquisition of GBP 17 million. What is the future market opportunity for RWS? Well, this slide, which is based on an aggregation of the markets that we serve, which you saw in Ian's earlier slides, illustrates two very simple points. The first is that it's a very large set of markets we play in, more than GBP 47 billion, and it's very highly fragmented with only 25% served by the big players. There's plenty to go for, and this is underlined by the regular flow of opportunities we see. Just for instance, in the last 24 hours, I've had two inbound M&A opportunities.
As part of our strategic review over the last few months, we've refined and agreed a number of priorities for M&A, and these have been collectively developed and agreed by the executive team and by each division accounting for the growth priorities in each of those divisions. Firstly, in terms of Localization and Language Services. In the short term, we will focus on targets with attractive end markets. This could be in areas such as Regulated Industries, for instance, electronic trial master file companies, linguistic validation, or opportunities in e-discovery, or frankly, any vertical which offers enhanced prospects for growth. Geographically, we think that Asia in particular is attractive, and in the medium term, we are more likely to consider some competitive LSPs as we streamline the operational model with the prospect of increasing synergies.
Secondly, we'll also look at opportunities which either build on or enhance our capabilities in the higher growth tech-enabled services. For instance, there are a number of interpretation platforms, and we would be more interested in these than the traditional face-to-face or remote interpretation businesses. We would also be interested in, for example, some captioning technology or web content publishing opportunities. Thirdly, and as touched on by Mihai, we would look at opportunities which provide natural language processing capabilities which augment Language Weaver, and in particular, where there's a wider application than simply machine translation. Fourthly, as Thomas has already described, we undertake a range of data annotation activities for our clients, and we believe that there are opportunities to expand our activities in this sphere, and particularly where there is a linguistic angle.
Screening. Having refined our priorities is a significant practical help in two ways and will make our process for looking at M&A more efficient. Firstly, we will not waste time reviewing acquisitions which are not right for us, and we do see, as I've said earlier, a lot of these, and we can now focus on those that firmly align with our strategic objectives. Secondly, the ability to be clear in our requirements will help us focus research and also leverage the search through our internal and external networks. Our view is that all future acquisitions should meet two preeminent criteria. The first one is that they fit with the strategic priorities I set out on the previous slide, and the second one is that they should enhance the organic growth profile of the group. There are then three further measures that we will use.
The first one is valuation and returns, and that will include some reference to margin, to multiple, and to return on capital. Of course, multiples will vary, and they'll vary depending on whether we're looking at, for instance, a competitor LSP or whether we're looking at a higher growth tech-enabled target. We will also look at the ease of integration, and there is a spectrum here between, if you like, the risk of the acquisition from a complex integration, but also the opportunity for synergies that comes from that. Last, but importantly, is the cultural fit and how that target will fit with the values that were outlined earlier by Ian. This framework should ensure that we continue to be disciplined in assessing the M&A opportunities in the future.
To conclude, we have an impressive track record here at RWS. We have refined a clear set of priorities for the future, and we have a framework to ensure we will be disciplined in reviewing the multiple opportunities we see in what is a large and fragmented market. Thank you for your attention, and I'll now hand over to Des, who will cover our financial prospects.
Thanks, Christopher. I'm Des Glass, the Group CFO here at RWS. I have been with the business for 4.5 Years, and continuing with the international theme for the avoidance of all doubt, I am 100% Irish. I'm gonna kick off today with our updated outlook for the financial year. You'll have seen the detailed RNS that we released this morning, but I will walk you quickly through the main points here. I'm pleased to say that we're continuing to see strong growth from our Regulated Industries division, along with increasing momentum from our Language and Content Technology division, where SaaS revenues are increasing at a faster rate than we previously expected. Now that growth is two things really.
It's the annualized rate of last year's new logo plus, in fact, very strong new logo wins to date, specifically in the Tridion division, which I think Thomas mentioned earlier. There are, though, unfortunately a couple of immediate headwinds that will impact our full year results, and I'll touch on these now. First, IP Services. Those of you who have followed RWS over the years will be very familiar with the Unitary Patent. In fact, our M&A strategy six years ago was initially focused on diversifying away from that threat. We now know after many years of delays and false dawns, it will finally come into operation in the second half of the calendar year.
We think that this has impacted both revenues in the first half of the year as a direct result of the EPO gearing up for this change. Also the second half of the year, where companies now have the option to defer applications until the formal introduction of the UP later in the year. This will have a negative impact, of course, on both revenue and contribution in the second half of this year. Moving on to Ukraine and Russia, well, look, the situation in Ukraine is obviously horrendous, so our main priority, and we've been incredibly focused on this, is to keep supporting and looking after our employees in both of our offices in Kyiv, in Ukraine, and Saint Petersburg in Russia.
From a financial point of view, though, we do have a small exposure to Russian language revenues, which make up roughly 1% of total group revenue. That translates into about GBP 8 million of revenue on an annualized basis, so both revenue and contribution are now expected to fall in H2. As you can imagine, it's hard to predict the exact evolution of that over the coming months with any certainty. We've tried to be prudent in our guidance. You'll also have seen in a separate RNS this morning that we introduced the acquisition of Fonto. We announced the acquisition of Fonto for EUR 22. 5 million. Based in the Netherlands, this acquisition will significantly increase the reach and capability of our Tridion product.
It's a good example of how we'll continue to pursue both bolt-on acquisitions and potentially transformational acquisitions, where we see a real opportunity to accelerate our plans. In terms of numbers, in calendar 2021, Fonto posted revenues of close to EUR 5 million with an operating profit of EUR 2 million, and even I can do the math on that. It's a very nice high-margin acquisition at 40% net margin, and we think it's gonna be a great addition to the RWS stable. That's the updated outlook, but let's move on and be very clear here. There's a lot to be excited about in our markets. We feel it's an incredibly exciting time to be at RWS, and by investing now, we can really maximize our exposure to some of the faster-growing market segments that we play in today.
Of all the questions that I'm asked by investors, including some of you in this very audience, I'm probably asked this one the most. Surely machine translation is a threat, perhaps even an existential threat to your business. Well, it's not. It's an opportunity, and here's why. RWS has a unique combination of technology. We own and control our very own machine translation solution in Language Weaver that Mihai's talked about earlier. We have great people. As Maria has just explained, we're the only LSP who can effectively combine significant scalable technology platforms with our own in-house language delivery function. This unique combination allows us to take advantage of higher word volumes through relentlessly driving better automation, which ultimately results in higher gross margins across the business. I think Maria promised I was gonna talk a little bit about that.
In terms of gross margin over the next year or two, it will be flat next year, but we'll see margin accretion in each of the three years after that. By taking advantage of this unique market position, we're perfectly placed to accelerate investment in some exciting new growth areas. Data annotation and e-learning in Language Services, faster investment into the higher margin linguistic validation market in Regulated Industries, and content intelligence in our Technology Division. All faster-growing market segments that we aim to capitalize on. In addition to our exciting new growth markets, we see a real opening to take advantage of the mid-market opportunity.
We already serve 90 of the world's top 100 brands, but we see a real opportunity to accelerate growth by targeting the mid-market sector in particular, where more and more companies are adopting language and content technology products, and we feel we're best placed to serve them. Let's talk a little bit about the investments we're planning to accelerate this growth. These investments break down into four main areas. As you can see, these may have differing payback profiles, but are united by the fact they will all pay back over relatively short time frames, and each investment will contribute meaningful shareholder value over time. First, we're investing in our long-term relationships to ensure we're focused on top-line revenue growth.
In the past, we've grown revenues primarily through increased volumes, but we will now also invest behind sales enablement and targeted marketing in order to drive not just new logo growth, which is important, but as importantly, help drive both pricing and volumes across our existing customer base. Next, we're gonna invest further in our cultural and technical expertise to further build and protect our competitive moats to ensure we stay ahead of our competition in these critical growth areas. So what does that mean? Well, for Language Services, we're increasing investment in our technology platform by harnessing our crowd solution to support the growth of our data annotation services. We'll continue to develop our e-learning go-to-market proposition. For Regulated Industries, we're investing in both people and technology through automating processes in our fast-growing linguistic validation business.
That's important because it's the highest margin part of the Regulated Industries business. We're also investing in our tech capability. The third investment category focuses on our unique technology and AI solutions. Unique in this industry, we want to invest now to continue to grow and widen this advantage. In order to do this, we're gonna invest to drive growth in Trados Enterprise, as Thomas talked about. This will involve a significant movement towards fully embracing a SaaS business model, which will not just pay back significantly over time, but will also provide better visibility of upcoming revenues. As part of this investment, we will migrate customers to use cloud-based products, which will then also enable us to reduce our legacy technical debt and optimize our existing R&D resources.
We're also gonna continue to drive our Language Weaver proposition with its multiple use cases in order not just to support our Language Services revenue growth, which is obviously important, but to fully realize our potential standalone technology revenues from this product. Last but not least, we're gonna invest in our tech infrastructure. By taking advantage of our scale advantage, we can double down and really drive increased operational leverage throughout this business. We're gonna invest in a single finance and HR platform that will deliver not just for the existing businesses, but crucially will allow for smarter integration of future acquisitions. We're gonna invest further to build our language delivery platform, which is critical to realizing the gross margin growth that we talked about throughout this plan.
We're gonna invest in specific divisional areas, such as the ongoing IP Services workflow transformation program, which will guarantee longer term margin growth. It's also important to stress that these investments are based on our existing organic growth plan and from internal resources. We can of course, choose to deploy our balance sheet and accelerate further and faster growth through the use of M&A. As we talked through earlier, the acquisition of Fonto I think is a great example of this. Why are we making these investments? Well, we wanna fundamentally improve our business mix by exposing the underlying business to the fastest-growing parts of the end markets that we currently serve today. Today, the weighted average growth rate of the markets that we operate in is 4% in terms of growth.
By shifting our revenue mix towards the higher growth markets, we'll increase this to over 6% over the plan. We'll do this by increasing the proportion of our overall revenues generated in the higher growth markets of technology and life sciences, where high single-digit growth is expected, and we expect to do at least that. Finally, both Thomas and Mihai have talked at length about our transition to SaaS. To put this in some context, we're planning to grow our SaaS revenues as a percentage of technology revenues from the 25% that we see today to more than twice that, to over 50% in 2026. The move away from perpetual and term license may impact revenues and margins in the short term, but it'll build sustainable shareholder value over time.
We've got absolutely no hesitation in making this move. Moving on, let's talk about the impact of this growth acceleration plan on our numbers. In phase one, FY 2022 - 2024, we'll grow revenues in line with the overall market growth of 4%. PBT margin will be broadly flat over this period, but will dip next year due to increased level of operational and CapEx investment in FY 2023, the key investment year for us, before recovering again in the following year. Cash conversion will also decline slightly, mainly as a result of the increased CapEx requirements, but we'll still be in the range of 80%-85% over the next couple of years notwithstanding that.
The investments we're making will result in increased CapEx, which will now grow from circa 4% of group revenues to just under 7% next year, before returning to 4% in the outer years of the plan, the level which we see as the new baseline moving forward, consistent with the increased share of technology revenues that we'll be generating. We'll then see the fruits of the investment in the second phase of the five-year plan from FY 2024 - 2026. You saw earlier that we're exposed to end market growth of 6% by this second phase. We'll generate organic growth greater than this due to our revenue pivot towards life sciences and technology revenues, which will effectively help drive compounded annual growth throughout the five-year plan of over 6%, and clearly higher than 6% in the outer years of the plan.
Crucially, this will help deliver operational leverage of close to twice this rate. In terms of net margins, we'll deliver an incremental 2-3 percentage points to the bottom line, which will ensure we comfortably hit and surpass the 20% goal that we have set ourselves and previously communicated to all of you as our minimum longer term net margin target. Over the second phase, reducing CapEx demands will also deliver cash conversion back to our expected range of 95%-100% by the end of the plan. Finally, it's worth stressing here that the reason we're making these investments is to ensure longer term shareholder growth. I've said that, but I mean it. Historically, we've delivered ROCE in excess of 14%.
Now, this fell to 8% immediately following the acquisition of SDL, but it's increased in line with our outperformance on synergies to 10% last year and is on track to hit 12% this year. In the second half of the plan, we believe the investments that we're outlining today will accelerate us past the 14% of our historical rate, before hitting 16% by fiscal 2026. These investments are governed by our capital allocations policy. It's a familiar slide to many of you from our investor roadshows over the years. But simply put, all of the reasons that you're happy investors in RWS remain in place. We remain a relatively low CapEx business with a very high cash generation and a strong balance sheet that will support further growth. How will we do this?
Well, one, we're gonna continue to spend to support our underlying business growth with baseline CapEx representing no more than 4% of revenues throughout the period. Secondly, we're gonna invest to accelerate organic growth further. I mentioned earlier we're gonna invest in targeted growth areas, technology products, and the underlying infrastructure that supports our business. In big picture terms, these investments represent almost GBP 50 million in incremental CapEx across the period above our baseline CapEx. We'll also continue our progressive dividend policy. The graph here I think nicely demonstrates that growth over the past five years, and we plan on continuing to deliver this double-digit dividend growth throughout the next five years, when we'll return close to GBP 300 million back to our shareholders. Finally, we'll also, of course, continue to acquire businesses to accelerate this organic growth plan.
We'll generate over GBP 600 million of free cash flow over this five-year plan with over half of this available post-dividend to add to what we believe is already the strongest balance sheet in this industry. We can, if we choose, utilize this strength to raise debt, and we have the ability to leverage incremental debt capacity of almost GBP 500 million. That's at a leverage level of 2.5x EBITDA. We're filled with plenty of firepower, and we're really well, well-placed in our industry to continue to acquire, whether to bolt on our transformational acquisitions to further accelerate growth. Moving on to my last slide.
You recognize the left-hand side of the slide from an earlier section today, but I'll make no apology for showing it again as it's such a great reminder to everyone here of the fundamentals, and they are great fundamentals, notwithstanding the share price movement this morning, that have made and continue to make RWS such a compelling investment. Put simply, we've a long and strong track record of delivering shareholder growth. Revenues have grown from GBP 164 million just over five years ago to just shy of GBP 700 million last year. That's more than a four-fold increase. What's really encouraging is that this growth's been achieved not just as the result of our acquisition strategy, it helped obviously, but also through strong organic growth in excess of 6% per annum over the past 10 years.
While revenues have grown, so too have profits. We've been able to take advantage of our unique business model, unique in this industry, to deliver strong double-digit earnings growth across the period, evidenced by consistent EPS growth, which has grown by an average of 14% over the last five years and allowed us to expand our progressive dividend policy. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see our track record of progressive dividend growth, which increased by over 15% per year since our IPO back in 2003.
Look, the future is not promised, but in conclusion, I hope that this slide provides reassuring backdrop to investment decisions that we've outlined today and will allow us not just build upon, but accelerate this growth story and continue to ensure that you can rely on RWS to deliver substantial increases in shareholder value well into the future. On that note, I will hand you back over to Ian for some final closing remarks. I'll also apologize for the slide.
Thanks, Des. Right. Well, final leg. Thank you for your attention through the course of the afternoon. I've got three closing slides. We've got a bit of time for questions and a closing video, and then we've all earned ourselves a drink. Started the day with this chart. I really hope we've achieved the objectives we set out to achieve. I hope you now understand better how we plan to build on our unique platform, and I hope you understand why it is, in our view, truly unique. I hope you've got a lot more insight into what we do and how we do it. If you haven't had a chance to look at the tech demonstrations outside, I would encourage you to do so if you've got time before you go.
I hope we've given you a lot more detail on how we plan to accelerate growth in the business, and I hope we've really shown you how technology is a critical part of all of those plans. I hope we've given you some color to what we're investing in and why we're doing it. You've seen our team. This is our plan. We've worked on it together. We've spent a lot of time on it, and we're passionate about delivering it. Here's a summary of everything we've talked about all on one page.
Our purpose, who we are, what we do, that growth model that you've seen repeated throughout the course of the afternoon, customers first, long-term client relationships, deep cultural and technical expertise, unique technology and AI, an ability to continue to develop our portfolio as we have done successfully through M&A and organic investments, and a much clearer view on how we're gonna drive operating leverage and margin improvement through the course of the plan. Clarity about how we're gonna work together to continue to partner with our clients and with each other to drive this plan, to remain pioneers in our industry, to drive progress, and to continue to deliver for all of our stakeholders. Clear, I hope, financial guidance as to what that all looks like. In summary, we think a continuing and attractive investment proposition.
We've got great positions in some attractive end markets, and we're well diversified. Got great client relationships with scope to grow, both with those clients and by adding to them. A truly unique platform combining that cultural and technical expertise and proprietary technology. Continued strong cash generation, and the ability to continue to deploy that in a very fragmented industry. It is a long-term sustainable business delivering financial, and I hope we've shown social value in lots of different ways. Thank you very much for your attention.