We then outlined early 2005 M&A in the language industry, noting buy-outs by Merrill and M2. Just a few months later, Lionbridge and SDL announced their acquisitions of major competitors Bowne Global Solutions and Trados, respectively. L-3 bought Titan, government-focused LSP with language revenue of US$285 million. We closed the year with Welocalize and Connect Global announcing their merger. All told, language industry M&A in 2005 came to just about US$545 million, give or take a few shekels. We should also mention another US$6 million that Idiom Technologies collected from its venture capital backers.

Consider that US$545 million against the year's total of US$1.1 trillion in the U.S. While the language industry numbers look small against the backdrop of multi-billion dollar deals, language service providers and globalization software vendors struggle with the same issues as P&G and SBC. We wrote that smaller firms feel the need to get larger, everyone wants to be in the inner circle, Europeans LSPs were looking for a quick start in the U.S., and larger LSPs would up the ante. All that happened. What's next? We would bet on the continued acceleration of the middle tier of the market (those with US$20-100 million in revenue) and more cross-border M&A activity.

To calibrate the language industry activity, let's run some 2005 numbers from Forbes:

• Global M&A volume grew to US$2.9 trillion in 2005.
• U.S. and European M&A both reached US$1.1 trillion.
• U.K. companies bought US$26.3 billion of U.S. companies (including Trados).

In other merger activity, we should note that scientists found that "a previously unrecognized galaxy appears to be merging with the Milky Way, bringing hundreds of thousands of stars into our home galaxy that no one has noticed until now."