Belgian-American speech recognition software company Lernout & Hauspie said Monday that it has acquired Bumil Information & Communications Ltd, a Korean developer of interactive voice, call center and other telecommunications applications. The deal calls for L&H to hand over $25m in cash, with up to an additional $25m performance-based earn-out to be paid in January 2001.
L&H claims the acquisition will give it significant resources to expand its telecoms application development expertise and positions it as a speech and language market leader in the Pacific Rim. The two companies have worked together since 1997, and Bumil has used L&H technology to develop telecoms applications for Korea’s largest commercial bank and for the Korean Stock Exchange.
L&H expects that the transaction will be slightly dilutive for 1999 and accretive in 2000. Bumil, founded in 1992, has an annual revenue run rate of $12m. Under the terms of the acquisition, its 70 employees, including 35 developers, will remain in Bumil’s existing Seoul facilities. L&H already has offices in Tokyo, Singapore and China and claims an Asia-Pacific customer base that includes Samsung, LG Semicon, NEC, Hitachi, Sega and Fuji-Xerox, among others.
