What you're saying is that Appen had to diversify away from big tech, because big tech were dropping Appen like a hot potato and saying "hey...we no longer require the services of a labour hire company, we can do this stuff in-house". So they did.
It's quite simple really. When your customer base is tiny (regardless of how big they are), you only need one of your customers to start losing interest before you find yourself in trouble.
It's called concentration risk and Appen adopted this risk in spades.
End of story really. It's as simple as that.
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