My second year at the helm of Transfluent is now behind me. Naturally, the year of the coronavirus was full of unprecedented challenges. The changes we made in 2019 led to a strong first quarter in 2020, and we set a new revenue record.
When the coronavirus struck at the end of March, it had a huge impact on the business of many companies, including restaurants. Transfluent has over 1,600 customers from a range of sectors and different parts of the world. One of our biggest customer groups is restaurants, whose menus we regularly translate. The coronavirus impacted on our revenue in April, which was the worst in our history. Q2 was spent monitoring the impacts of COVID-19, and tearing our hair out.
The skies began to clear in Q3. The coronavirus forced practically all companies to give serious consideration to the role of e-commerce in their business, and the potential of international markets. This suited us, because our strategy defines such companies as just the ones we aim to help.
Agility tends to be a strength of small companies. This proved useful to us: Transfluent’s Board of Directors quickly authorized me to apply for support from Business Finland and financial institutions, to help us implement our strategy. We decided to use the financial support we received to develop our strategic focus areas: automated translation in the Shopify, WooCommere, Magento and Zendesk environments.
The time had come to act and focus on the services and target groups defined in our strategy. Naturally, this meant abandoning certain old activities and focus areas. It also meant changes to the job descriptions and employment relationships of several employees. Change is always difficult, but the COVID-19 crisis helped us in this respect, since everyone understood the root cause of the changes.
By the end of the year, we had fully implemented our new strategy and our revenue for Q4 was very good. The final result of this challenging year was double-digit annual revenue growth in Finland and globally. For this, a big thank you to all our employees, our translator network, our partners and the Board.
The current year will be one of product development. We are renewing our technology platforms together with our development partners. The goal is to ensure that our technology is scalable, so that we can serve the world's largest companies and challenge our competitors globally.
Our growth requires experts, so in the coming year we will recruit several new employees in marketing, sales, product development and our team of translators. Could you be part of our interesting future?
