Lernout & Hauspie

Lernout & Hauspie Speech Product, also called L & H, was a leading speech recognition development companies based in Ypres in the Belgian province of West Flanders, which went bankrupt in 2001. This area was then modeled after Silicon Valley and Flanders Language Valley ( German: Flanders Sprachtal ) called.

History

L & H was founded in 1987 by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie. After a difficult beginning, the company grew rapidly and in 1995 on the NASDAQ to a corporation ( LHSP ), which has been cited on the EASDAQ. The headquarters of L & H were in Ypres, Belgium, and in Burlington, Massachusetts. At its peak, L & H had a market capitalization of almost 10 billion U.S. dollars.

Flanders played an important role in the investment in the Company. L & H soon became the pride of Flanders.

L & H bought some of its smaller competitors, including in 1996, Berkeley Speech Technologies. In March / April 2000 L & H, the Company acquired Dictaphone for almost 1 billion U.S. dollars, shortly afterwards Dragon Systems, L & H was bought.

For some time there have been persistent rumors about Finanzunschicklichkeit at L & H. Beginning of 1999, the Wall Street Journal in his column " Heard on the Street" ( German: on the street heard ) over allegations by the Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Smithson that L & H had operated accounting fraud. Further investigation by the Wall Street Journal staff Jesse Eisinger led to the unveiling of a financial scandal on 8 August 2000, which includes air bookings in Korea and improper accounting elsewhere with. Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie - - In April 2001, the founder of L & H were and the former L & H Board Gastron Bastiaens arrested. The matter is considered to be one of the biggest economic scandals in history before Enron. L & H finally went bankrupt on 25 October 2001.

Developed by L & H technology was acquired by Nuance Communications (formerly ScanSoft ) after the bankruptcy. Nuance acquired the entire speech recognition and speech synthesis technology of L & H.

Many people, especially in West Flanders, were dazzled by the rapid success of the company and lost a lot of money by L & H shares.