L&H bankruptcy confuses sector
- Added:
- Nov 30, 2000
The potential demise of the company comes as a blow in a sector attracting much investment over the last few months - just weeks ago, L&H announced an aggressive European marketing strategy. BT Genie has also been "seriously investigating" the technologies, according to a spokesperson.
L&H has reportedly fallen victim to a series of accounting blunders concerning its South Korean subsidiary, which apparently has had a ‘significant' shortfall on its balance sheet. Additionally, the company is due to make a $200m debt repayment in March, making the sourcing of new investment less likely.
It is not yet known what would happen to the companies technology holdings in the event of bankruptcy, but a spokesperson for Philips speech processing division said: "L&H has one of the best text-to-speech offerings on the market. We recommend it for certain applications alongside our own technologies - I hope someone keeps it going!"
According to the spokesperson, the sector is growing at an exponential rate - although the fallout in the sector from L&H's difficulties has yet to be seen. UK-based company Speechnet implemented an L&H text-to-speech module several months back and said today that it "would keep using it at the moment," although the spokesperson pointed out that they were not necessarily tied to L&H.