Regarding Korea (from the recent SEC filings):
Recently, the Far East has become a major focus of our business strategy, and, during 1999, our revenues from the Far East increased substantially. We began developing speech engines for Asian languages in 1995 and introduced
Korean and Japanese versions of our text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition technologies in 1996 and 1997. Since 1997, we have continued to develop and enhance Asian language versions of our technologies and applications. During 1998 and 1999, we expanded our Asian language offerings to include specific solutions for telephony, embedded, automotive, translation and intelligent content management applications.
We opened our research and development business center (competence center) in Singapore in 1998. Through this competence center, during 1999, we licensed our development tools to various Asian strategic partners for the development of versions of our technologies and applications in additional Asian languages. We also have expanded our business reach to Asian manufacturers of consumer, automotive, embedded and telephony applications during 1998 and 1999.
In September 1999, we acquired Bumil Information & Communication, Co., Ltd., a developer of interactive voice, call center and other telephony and telecommunications market applications, based in Seoul, South Korea. This
acquisition provides us with increased resources to apply our core technologies to develop telephony applications and solutions. Following this acquisition, we accelerated the introduction of our speech and language technologies, roducts, solutions and services for enterprise and telephony into the Korean market. In the fourth quarter of 1999, by combining our technologies, products, solutions
and services with Bumil's existing business, we were able to substantially increase our revenues in Korea. In addition to licensing our core speech technology, our offerings in Korea include the following products and ervices:
. Client services for call centers and automated attendants (currently in use
by banks, securities companies and other corporate customers);
. Client service solutions for on-line securities trading (currently in use in
over 15 securities companies in Korea);
. Applications for games, toys, and consumer appliances;
. Voice portals and speech services for stock quotes, news and sports;
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. Integration of speech and language technology for document management; and
. Application of speech and language solutions for English as a second
language.
We intend to begin to introduce our enterprise and telephony applications, solutions and services, including some of those listed above, to other markets, including Japan and other countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
[SNIP]
For the first quarter of 2000, total revenues were $110.7 million, an increase of 57% over total revenues of $70.7 million for the first quarter 1999. This increase was attributable to increases in revenues of all of our divisions.
This increase was primarily attributable to increases in revenues of our Technologies and Solutions, and Applications divisions, primarily from the Far
East where our revenues increased substantially due to revenues generated in the Korean market as a result of combining our technologies, products, solutions and
services with Bumil's existing business. In the first quarter of 2000 our revenues from Korea increased to $58.9 million from $97,000 in the first quarter of 1999.
[SNIP]
Speech and language technologies and solutions revenue increased by 138% to approximately $58.9 million in the first quarter of 2000 from approximately $24.7 million in the first quarter of 1999. This increase was primarily
attributable to increases in revenue associated with the telecom and the personal computer, multimedia and embedded markets. These increases were partially offset by a decrease in revenues associated with the license of our
development tools and our intelligent content management technologies. In the first quarter of 2000, we had no technologies and solutions revenue attributable to nonrefundable up-front license fees from strategic partners in connection with the license of our development tools to develop additional language versions and language pairs
for our core speech and language technologies, compared to approximately $6.3 million of such revenue in the first quarter of 1999.
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Comment: They would have been better off lumping things together as "Far East" rather than country by country.
I am not sure that Herb Greenberg read the 10-Q any further than the sales by geo segment table. I think that the LHSP finance department can be criticized for somewhat artless US reporting, but it is unlikely they are making the numbers up out of whole cloth as Herb seems to be hinting. There may be some "weird" currency translation effect in gross sales from the Korean won, however, that could be construed as an overstatement of sales, with the offset buried in "other comprehensive gains/losses" in the equity section. |
