PEABODY, Mass.-Following shareholder approval, speech technology giant ScanSoft Inc. has closed its acquisition of rival SpeechWorks International Inc.
Upon closing, SpeechWorks shareholders received 0.86 shares of ScanSoft common stock for each share of SpeechWorks stock they owned, resulting in an issuance of 32.5 million shares of ScanSoft common stock.
The combined company, operating under the ScanSoft name, now boasts an extensive portfolio of imaging and speech technologies, applications and services that automate business processes, offer innovative new solutions, increase customer satisfaction, and improve corporate and personal productivity.
ScanSoft also announced preliminary financial results for the second quarter of 2003, which it will release Aug. 14. “Second-quarter revenue for both imaging and speech is expected to be flat vs. the first quarter 2003, and in total, 5 to 7 percent higher than the second quarter last year,” said Paul Ricci, ScanSoft’s chairman and chief executive officer.
“Two areas of disappointment were, first, embedded text-to-speech for games and consumer devices in Asia, caused by the complexity of migrating our partners to a new product line and the SARS epidemic, and second, network speech where we experienced delays in licensing as partners and customers waited for the company to clarify its intentions in merging ScanSoft and SpeechWorks solutions,” added Ricci. “Each of these two areas unfavorably impacted revenue by approximately $1.5 million. We expect to see a continued adverse impact from these two factors in the third quarter.”
