The story
The company was created in 1982 from a merger between M.H. Randall & Partners (a specialist translation company) and Woolcott & Co (a specialist patent and technical information searching company). In 2005 it acquired Eclipse Translations, a company formed in December 1996. In 2015 it acquired Corporate Translations Inc. (CTi), a Connecticut-based life sciences translation and linguistic validation provider for a $70 million in cash. Then in 2017, the company acquired Luz, Inc., a US-based life sciences language services provider for $82.5 million: the company raised £40 million of the consideration by issuing 12.1m ordinary shares with the rest funded by a $26.3 million banking facility from Barclays.
In 2017, RWS purchased Czech-based localization provider Moravia IT for $320 million, more than doubling the size of the group.
On 4 November 2020, RWS completed an all-share combination with major competitor SDL, creating the world's largest technology and language services provider. The transaction was valued at approximately £854 million.
From Wikipedia’s article on RWS Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5