from the press release:

The transaction calls for L&H to acquire all of the outstanding stock of
Dragon Systems for approximately 5.45 million shares of L&H Common Stock.
L&H expects the acquisition to be slightly accretive to its EPS (excluding
goodwill) during the second half of 2000 and much stronger beyond 2000. The
company expects the acquisition to close in the next few months. Dragon
Systems had revenues of approximately $60 million and a net loss of
approximately $22 million for its fiscal year 1999. L&H intends to use the
purchase accounting method for this acquisition.

>From Dow Jones:

Lernout, which has U.S. headquarters in Burlington, Mass., says it is the
worldwide market leader in speech and language-technology software. The
company posted $344 million in revenue last year. Earlier this month, L&H
acquired Dictaphone Corp., a big player in the healthcare and
telecommunications voice-recording industries, for about $511 million in
stock, plus the assumption of about $425 million in debt. L&H has acquired
about two dozen companies during the past three years.
Copyright (c) 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Marty's comments:

It really doesn't matter what anyone thinks about L&H purchasing Dragon. It
is absolutely a good thing since Dragon would not have survived much longer
without a merger or acquisition. Last years sales of $60 million generated a
loss of $22 million. Dragon would not have been able to keep this up and
Seagate was probably not interested in hanging on to such a poor performing
investment in the short term. Dragon and Seagate should be very happy to
take the money and run. Just like the internet companies, bizarre valuations
are apparently the order of the day. L&H is paying over a half a billion
dollars in stock for Dragon. Hopefully Dragon's core technology will survive
these wranglings as we have been very happy with it as an engine for the
Synapse TAP and Synapse ADA Workstations.

Marty Tibor
Synapse
Speech Recognition and Adaptive Technology
3095 Kerner Blvd., Suite S, San Rafael, CA  94901
toll-free 888-285-9988
http://www.synapseadaptive.com
-------
40 page accessible text formatted catalog
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/txt/synapse1999.txt
-------
48 page Adobe Acrobat format catalog
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/pdf/Synapse40p.pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat
Reader ver. 4)
-------
http://www.naturalspeak.com
Providers of adaptive and assistive technology solutions.
-------
http://www.unixspeech.com
UNIX, mainframe and Mac speech recognition
-------
Speech recognition technical assistance
Synapse hosts the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Unofficial Information Pages
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/default.htm


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