Lionbridge CEO Rory Cowan opened today’s Q3 conference call by introducing the new CFO Don Muir and having him lead off the presentation.  This is both a polite way to welcome the newcomer and appropriate to today’s message, which is that the sprawling localization giant’s challenge is to get better real-time insight into its far-flung operations and better structures in place in order to harness the still-elusive benefits of scale.  As it is, an improvement here was offset by a decline there, currency movements helped and hurt in about equal measure, and the story in financial terms was that there wasn’t much of a story.The Company’s strategy is to focus on large clients with complex deliverables, employing its size and scope as a differentiator.  On that front, Lionbridge was able to announce some successes.  Google is now its second-largest client.  The top ten clients still account for 52% of revenue, but that number would have increased if not for slippage in a large project for the number one client Microsoft.  Cowan reported a 20% year-on-year increase in the global development and testing (GDT) business and increased sales of GDT services to its traditional localization (GLC, in Lion-speak) clients. The other main component of Lionbridge’s “go big” strategy is to centralize client workflow on its Logoport translation management system.  Logoport scored its first 50 million word week during the quarter, and was adopted by two additional Microsoft divisions.Cowan reported that the Company is helping to transition its smaller clients to smaller LSPs among its suppliers.  The table scraps of the industry’s only $400 million company could be significant to smaller players, but when pressed Cowan could report having “culled” only 1% of revenue in this manner.The problem with Lionbridge having no particular story to tell in its financial results is that its investors have grown impatient for one.  Cowan talked about gross margin improvements in terms of basis points — hundredths of a percent — while its gross margins are a full 16% less than rival SDL’s.  Lionbridge is not a broadly traded stock, 95% of its shares are held by insiders and institutions, which means that the verdict of the analysts who are the primary audience for the conferece call can be read fairly quickly.  We received our first “falling stock price alert” (see graph above) while the call was in progress, and by noon LIOX had lost 20% of its value.