For the quarter ending December 31, the company posted net income of $3.1m, compared with net income of $1.3m, in the quarter ended December 31, 2003. Revenues were up 29% at $60.6m, compared to $46.9m.
Meanwhile, on Nasdaq shares in the company rose 5.8% to $4.70 as of 4.15pm GMT on Tuesday.
It did highlight the strong state of the speech market, and strong demand for its network speech solutions and services among enterprises.
Mike Thompson, VP of international marketing, said: We are experiencing strong demand in speech recognition in general, and for all our customer solutions. We have also experienced strong demand in UK and Europe as well.
It is no wonder that the Peabody, Massachusetts-based company has continued to experience revenue growth, when one examines its acquisition trial over the past two years.
Back in October 2002, it signaled its intention to take on IBM Corp in the speech-recognition market, with the acquisition of the speech-processing business units of Royal Philips Electronics for $35.4m.
Then in April 2003, it paid $132m to acquire fellow speech company SpeechWorks International Inc, which helped ScanSoft gain a dominant share of the speech-recognition market.
This was followed in January 2004 with the acquisition of Montreal, Canada-based LocusDialog Inc, which expanded ScanSoft’s SpeechWorks suite of packaged speech applications. Financial terms of that deal were not disclosed.
Then in May 2004 it purchased Telelogue Inc, also for an undisclosed amount, to bolster the global directory assistance portfolio for the SpeechWorks division.
Finally in November last year it agreed to pay up to a total of $98.2m in cash for three companies to strengthen its product range in the areas of directory assistance, enterprise speech applications, and wireless applications.
It paid an initial $35m for Phonetic Systems, with the potential for a further $35m if targets are met over the next three years. Phonetic offers a voice search engine to automate carrier directory assistance, voice access to CRM applications, and password management.
To build its presence in the mobile market, ScanSoft paid $21.5m for Advanced Recognition Technologies Inc, which offers embedded speech and handwriting technology for mobile devices.
ScanSoft also paid $6.7m for Edinburgh, Scotland-based Rhetorical Systems Ltd, which it said would strengthen its position in text-to-speech software.
The strong demand experienced by ScanSoft is inline with a recent study released ComputerWire’s parent company, Datamonitor. It believes that by the end of 2008, global enterprise investment in transactional voice solutions to net technology vendors is expected to be in excess of $300m with North America, Europe, the Middle-East and Africa accounting for 75% of the global market.
