AI company that Samsung pursued to acquire 7 years ago… Prospects for expanding medical technology services
On the 12th (local time), Microsoft (MS) agreed to acquire artificial intelligence (AI) and voice recognition technology company Nuance Communications for 16 billion dollars (about 18 trillion won).
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), and including debt, Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance will rise to $19.7 billion (about 22 trillion won).
This acquisition will be Microsoft’s second-largest merger and acquisition after LinkedIn in 2016, which was worth $27 billion.
The acquisition price is $56 per share, and it will be paid in full in cash.
This is 23% higher than the Nuance closing price on the 9th.
Nuance, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA, was founded in 1992 and specializes in AI and speech recognition technology.
Earlier, Samsung Electronics also promoted the acquisition of Nuance with private equity firms in 2014.
Nuance recorded a net profit of $7 million on sales of $36 million in the fourth quarter of last year, but sales declined 4% last year.
In addition to Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s acquisition was amid increasing competition for voice recognition assistant services such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Google Assistant.
Microsoft also released a voice assistant service for consumers called’Cortana’, but decided to stop supporting smartphone apps last year and focus on supporting enterprise software.
The New York Times (NYT) analyzed that Nuance also provides AI services for medical use, so the acquisition of Microsoft is a step toward expanding the market for medical technology services.
According to NYT, the two companies are already working together on a technology that automatically records oral conversations between doctors and patients and incorporates them into patients’ medical records.
/yunhap news
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