— Strategy consulting combined with HonyakuOS, a multilingual content management and generative-AI platform, to support Japanese companies end to end as they expand and localize abroad —
Catalys Inc. is pleased to announce that it has entered into a capital and business alliance with Queen & Co., Ltd. (head office: Towada, Aomori; Representative Director: Alex Queen; hereafter “Queen & Co.”). The alliance brings together Catalys’s strategy consulting and HonyakuOS, the generative-AI multilingual content management platform Queen & Co. has built over ten years, to support Japanese companies expanding overseas: raising the quality of multilingual communication, making the work more efficient, and keeping the brand message consistent, all in one place.
■ Background and purpose
As the domestic market shrinks with an ageing and declining population, more Japanese companies each year put overseas expansion at the center of their growth strategy. But stepping into a global market takes more than a business strategy. It takes the means to communicate in several languages — accurately, and without damaging your own brand — to customers and partners on the ground.
In practice, many Japanese companies declare global expansion in their mid-term plan and then struggle to control the quality of their multilingual content. Every translation starts again from nothing. Terminology, context and a feel for tone leave with the person who moves on or resigns. The brand message drifts. All of this costs them marketing quality and competitiveness in overseas markets.
Queen & Co. has worked on this problem for ten years. It was early to build a cloud translation platform, Honyaku Cloud, which gathered translation information in one place and made it manageable as a whole. Since then it has helped clients across many industries and regions, listed companies and large organizations among them, build multilingual knowledge systems that go beyond translation, and has kept developing the service.
Catalys is a strategy consulting firm founded by people who came from leading global strategy firms. Through overseas expansion strategy, M&A execution and marketing strategy, we support the global growth of Japanese companies from the first idea through to execution. That work has shown us that managing and using multilingual content is one of the largest bottlenecks Japanese companies face abroad.
Two firms that have seen the same problem from different angles are now working together, so that support runs in one line from setting the strategy to managing and improving multilingual content.
■ About Queen & Co.
Queen & Co. is a multilingual content management platform company for enterprises, bringing language and technology together to deliver what comes after translation. Since it was founded in 2016 it has built on translation, interpreting and copywriting while continuing to redefine what a language service is. It operates from Tokyo and Aomori in Japan and from London in the United Kingdom.
Honyaku Cloud, the cloud translation platform it was early to build, later grew into HonyakuOS, a next-generation platform informed by research into multilingual information management at a leading private university in Tokyo.
HonyakuOS is fundamentally different from a machine translation tool: it is a platform for managing multilingual content and language assets. A company’s mission, vision and values, its product information, brand guidelines and regulatory requirements are linked accurately to the content, and generative AI works together with human translators (human in the loop). Because every translation is stored as knowledge and reused, quality rises and cost falls the longer it is used, and the brand stays consistent without anyone having to police it.
Every step is traceable — who approved and published what, and when — so the work is transparent and does not depend on any one person. Knowledge is not lost when someone changes role. Translation memories, glossaries, style guides and other language assets build up over time and become the foundation of an organization’s competitiveness abroad.
Queen & Co. serves clients across manufacturing, technology, finance, education and the public sector, listed companies among them, in Japan, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Asia. Its head office is in Towada, Aomori, and contributing to the region and creating social value are part of its founding purpose.
■ What the alliance covers
1. Joint proposals and cross-selling, for the benefit of clients
- Drawing on each firm’s client base, the two will jointly propose solutions that combine strategy consulting with HonyakuOS to Japanese companies looking to expand abroad.
2. Catalys supporting Queen & Co. as a management adviser
- Catalys will provide Queen & Co. with management consulting covering growth strategy, pricing, organization design and solution development, to support the expansion of its business.
3. Queen & Co. providing HonyakuOS to Catalys
- Queen & Co. will provide Catalys and Catalys’s clients with multilingual content management and localization support built on HonyakuOS, raising marketing quality and improving efficiency in overseas expansion.
■ Looking ahead
Through this alliance Catalys aims to hold a distinctive position: supporting the overseas expansion of Japanese companies in one line, from setting the strategy to controlling the quality of multilingual content.
Queen & Co., working with Catalys’s strategy consulting network, will accelerate the adoption of HonyakuOS and extend its knowledge management to more companies with international ambitions.
Together the two firms will grow their businesses with two aims held at once: strengthening the competitiveness of Japanese companies abroad, and returning value to Japanese society.
■ Comments from the leadership
Tomoyuki Abe and Akira Tanaka, Representative Directors, Catalys:
“Investing in Queen & Co. is a significant step for us. There is the obvious point that the founder brought the company into profit under his own steam. Beyond that, we see real possibility in how far HonyakuOS reaches: past translation and language services, into the information foundation that carries a company abroad. Commercially we expect cross-selling to help both firms grow, but what moves us more is Alex himself — his determination to contribute to Japanese society and to give something back to Aomori, his second home, and the fact that he has built the business around that. We share it. Leading Japanese companies into the world through strategy and technology: we will bring together what Queen & Co. knows about getting past the language barrier and what we know, and push that forward together.”
Alex Queen, Representative Director, Queen & Co.:
“In disclosure, investor relations included, a single mistranslated word can move how a company is judged. Yet at most companies the organizational context that accurate multilingual communication depends on — terminology, tone, regulatory wording, brand guidelines — sits in individual heads and leaves when those people do. HonyakuOS stores and shares that context as a language asset, so accuracy and brand consistency improve the more it is used. What we need is experience spanning Japanese, American and European business practice, and a foundation that scales organizational context in a way generative AI alone cannot. We chose Catalys as the partner to get there faster.”
■ Company details
About Catalys Inc.:
- Name: Catalys Inc.
- Head office: KDX Toranomon 1-chome Building 11F, 1-10-5 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-0001
- Representative Directors: Tomoyuki Abe and Akira Tanaka
- Business: strategy and management consulting (growth strategy and enterprise value, M&A strategy and execution, overseas strategy, AI strategy and implementation, organizational change, and more); business succession investment and growth support
- URL: https://catalys-inc.com/
About Queen & Co., Ltd.:
- Name: Queen & Co., Ltd.
- Head office: 14-54 Inaocho, Towada, Aomori 034-0011
- Tokyo office: Tile Building 5F, 4-36-13 Kuramae, Taito-ku, Tokyo
- Representative Director: Alex Queen
- Founded: 7 September 2016
- Business: language services (translation, interpreting and copywriting), systems development, web production, operational improvement, community business
- URL: https://ja.queenand.co/
■ Contact
[Enquiries about this announcement]
Catalys Inc., press office
Queen & Co., Ltd., press office
The release on PR Times