Fonix Corporation (NASDAQ: FONX) recorded barely $1 million in sales last year, yet its top three executives combined are paid $916,155, not including options and warrants. Those salaries are due to increase to $425,000 apiece for the next two years and then jump to $550,000 in 2000 before topping out at $750,000 in 2001. Salaries in the last two years in the contract are subject to review by the board of directors, but each of these three overly compensated executives is a member. And these men have a further stake in the company. Each could earn bonuses of up to 50 percent of their base salary, depending on Fonix's stock price throughout the year. Last year, the company paid more than $2 million in bonuses, according to a proxy filed with the SEC. All of this comes in addition to the lucrative $50,000 per month management agreement Fonix has had since 1994 with Studdert Companies Corp., which is owned by Fonix's three top executives. Recently some of those payments have been in the form of stock, rather than cash. Fonix claims to be the cutting-edge developer of voice recognition software - the applications that allow you to talk and your computer to type, among other things. There's no evidence of a commercially viable product, however Fonix announced last week that it will acquire all of the shares of Articulate Systems, an established competitor, in an undisclosed deal of cash and stock. Perhaps investors considering this buying shares of Fonix should perhaps instead take up lip reading.
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Fonix Announces New Sales of PowerScribe RadiologyDictation/Transcription Systems
Award-winning PowerScribe Radiology Speech Recognition System
Reduces Costs, Saves Time, Improves Efficiency
SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Fonix Corporation (Nasdaq: FONX) today announced six new hospitals have recently signed contracts for PowerScribe Radiology which collectively total $824,000 with additional revenues expected from the ongoing service and maintenance agreements. PowerScribe Radiology, the healthcare industry's leading integrated radiology speech recognition/dictation system, has been licensed by Shands Medical Center, Florida; Community General Hospital and Lawrence Hospital in New York; Griffin Hospital, Connecticut; Citrus Valley Medical Center, California; and Ingalls Health System, Illinois.
"Fonix is pleased with the addition of these new healthcare facilities, and welcome them into our growing list of clients," said Thomas A. Murdock, president of Fonix. "We are also encouraged by these sales revenues being contracted so early in our fiscal year."
"PowerScribe sales have been growing at a very strong rate and these latest orders build on that momentum," said Ivan Mimica, vice president and general manager of the Fonix Healthcare Solutions Group. "Hospitals choose the PowerScribe system because it offers the most complete and reliable solution for reducing their radiology transcription costs and report turn- around time."
Fonix also announced that it is currently Beta testing the PowerScribe Emergency Medicine System in a number of healthcare facilities. "Fonix is pleased with the acceptance and preliminary results from these in-hospital field tests. Also, we are enthusiastic regarding the numerous other potential healthcare applications in the PowerScribe family," said Mimica.
PowerScribe products, including PowerScribe Radiology and PowerScribe Emergency Medicine (EM), rapidly capture, transcribe and manage dictated clinical information across a hospital's network. PowerScribe was the winner of the 1998 Microsoft Healthcare Solution Award in the Acute Care Clinical Systems. By combining advanced continuous speech recognition technology with state-of-the-art digital dictation capabilities, PowerScribe provides healthcare organizations with cost savings, faster report turnaround time and other benefits without sacrificing physician acceptance or transcription accuracy. With PowerScribe, users can dictate their reports directly into text, edit, approve and sign them all within a matter of minutes. Once their reports are dictated, physicians can have them automatically transmitted to various hospital and/or departmental information systems via industry standard protocols.
About Fonix Corporation
Fonix Corporation (www.fonix.com), based in Salt Lake City, Utah with offices in Woburn, MA and Cupertino, CA, provides solutions to make human interaction with computers and other intelligence appliances more simple and convenient. The Fonix suite of products and services, including speech recognition, handwriting recognition and text to speech, provides natural, intuitive solutions that allow people and their technological tools to speak to and interact with each other in human terms. The healthcare solutions division of Fonix, formerly Articulate Systems, is an acknowledged leader in the application of advanced speech recognition technology to the healthcare market with its PowerScribe line of integrated dictation/transcription systems. Fonix technology enhances products offered by Fonix and its OEM partners and is included in computer and Internet based systems and devices for consumer, professional and industrial markets.
PowerScribe is a registered trademark of Fonix Corporation.
Note: The statements released by Fonix corporation that are not purely historical are forward-looking within the meaning of the "Safe Harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the Company's expectation, hopes, intentions, and strategies for the future. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements in this release include, but are not limited to, the challenges inherent in the development and delivery of complex technologies, market acceptance of the company's PowerScribe Emergency medicine (EM) product, the Company's ability to sell PowerScribe Radiology and EM through its own sales force rather than using the independent distributor, the adequacy of the Company's financial resources to execute its business plan, the Company's ability to respond to competitive developments and the Company's ability to retain Key technical, marketing and managerial personnel. It is important to note that the Company's actual results could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake any responsibility to update the forward-looking statements contained in this release.
SOURCE Fonix Corporation
CO: Fonix Corporation
ST: Utah
IN: CPR HEA
SU:
01/19/99 07:59 EST prnewswire.com |
