Web Summit 2025: Globalizing Companies Reframe Localization from Marketing Topic to Growth Agenda

In November 2025, Web Summit took place in Lisbon, and among its seventy thousand attendees, AI applications and global expansion were the two densest threads. For the language industry, one signal stood out: localization is being redefined from "the marketing department's translation budget" to "growth infrastructure."

Multiple SaaS and consumer app companies shared the same logic on stage: when a product enters a new market, localization quality directly affects activation and retention—localized app store copy drives download conversion, in-product copy drives onboarding completion, and multilingual help centers and support drive renewal. Localization is no longer remedial homework after going global; it is a third workstream alongside product and growth.

Procurement models are changing accordingly: more companies are abandoning ad-hoc per-project outsourcing in favor of continuous localization partnerships—translation workflows embedded directly into the product development cycle, with multilingual content updating in sync with each release. This demands engineering capabilities from language providers: API integration, version management, and terminology asset operations.

We have invested steadily in technical capabilities in recent years, offering continuous localization connected to clients' code repositories and content management systems. For Chinese companies going global, our advice remains constant: the earlier localization enters the product process, the lower the unit cost and the better the market response.