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Technology Stocks : Seagate Technology - Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (1468)	3/28/2000 6:25:00 PM
From: LK2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1989

Short article on Dragon Systems acquisition by Lernout & Hauspie. Article says Seagate owns about 35% of Dragon Systems. biz.yahoo.com

To: Sam who wrote (1468)	3/28/2000 8:46:00 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1989

Why is Seagate agreeing to sell Dragon Systems for peanuts? Speech recognition is clearly the user interface of the future. Microsoft, for example, has already launched its "Talk Hindi, Think Hindi" program in India, the Saudi Arabia of software programming, and that's eventually going to accelerate the rate of customizing software for different markets. It's not like SEG needs the money. Seagate should be finished selling 5-10 million shares of VRTS ($750-$1.5 billion) and a million shares of SNDK ($130-150 million) to fund its 50 million share buyback program and increase its war chest as the disk drive industry deals with overcapacity and move up the foodchain into SAN/NAS space. SEG's 35% or 38% share of Dragon converts to about 2 million LHSP shares or about 3% of the merged company (without Dictaphone). Selling the stake in the open market would yield less than $300 million while keeping it adds a unique dimension to its investments in compression (2 companies), embedded devices (Axis), business intelligence (Crystal) and Xiotech (virtualization software/hardware) This is a horrible, horrible sale that SEG is going to regret in years to come.