TRANSLATION business Lingo24 is expecting to report a return to profitability after seeing an eight per cent uplift in turnover for the 2017 financial year.

The Edinburgh-headquartered firm, which translates a range of e-commerce content for businesses including BrewDog and Hunter Boots, generated total sales of £9.5 million in the year to the end of December.

According to founder Christian Arno, the recent launch of an office in Amsterdam helped drive the growth, with the firm generating £1.3m of new business over the course of the year as a whole.

“We launched in Amsterdam in October,” Mr Arno said. “It’s interesting because there are a lot of international companies with e-commerce functions setting up there, partly for tax reasons but also because there is a lot of talent there.

“Because of the scale of their operations there we thought it was a sweet spot for us and it’s looking quite good so far.”

While the firm is still finalising its profit figure for the year, Mr Arno said it is likely to be the biggest in the 17-year-old firm’s history.

“We were profitable for our first ten years apart from one, then we raised investment and after we invested that money there was a big loss in 2015 and 2016,” he said.

“Last year we narrowed that loss to almost break even and I’m 99.9 per cent confident that we will be even more profitable than we have ever been in the past this year.”

As well as Amsterdam, Lingo24 has three overseas bases and one in London.