OnMobile Acquires France’s Telisma S.A.

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OnMobile Acquires France’s Telisma S.A.

OnMobile Global, India’s VAS major, has acquired France based speech recognition software provider Telisma S.A. As per the earnings call we had covered recently, OnMobile had indicated two acquisitions, the first within the next two quarters. A comment in the Earnings post by Vas-Guy stated OnMobile will “claim” and buy many more companies to “acquire revenues”, anybody willing to hedge their bets on the next acquisition? We will update this space once financial details are received. OnMobile Global shares rose by 1.56% to close at 646.55.

Nikhil adds: OnMobile has acquired 100 percent stake in Telisma. The company has been fairly categorical, saying that they’re not going to acquire companies for entering markets since the premium they’re going to pay for that is too high, and with their operator relationships, they can enter markets on their own strength. So this is about acquiring products. As per their website, Telisma has voice recognition software available in 10 Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, and English. Nothing on whether Laurent Balaine, CEO of Telisma, will remain with the company post acquisition. Ironically, OnMobile had recently completed a deal with Nasdaq listed Nuance Web Solutions for voice based search in 15 different languages, so what happens to that deal now?

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Cerius Shah May 18, 2008 4:24 AM ET

Posted In: Mobile, Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Mergers & Acquisitions, Companies, OnMobile

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James

As far I know ON not get any voice recognition project in Europe and I think that is because of politic market not because of solution

Srivathsan

if only somebody could throw up some dope on Tanla.

I met the management. they are talking as if they rule the UK VAS market and are waiting for 3G to be launched in India to storm the Indian market. But i am skeptical about the company…

Vas-Guy

No assignment from OM yet ;0)

Nikhil: How about getting to know reasons from OM management?

Long Time Listner Repeat Calle

"Finally, It could be a show stealer and we are not able to see the game yet"

Aah ..the flash of insight from VAS GUY ??

What is OM ? a Publicly listed company or some kind of undercover NSA outfit with Confidential STAMPED everywhere . everyone can see the reason ...

They are too small to buy out Nuance ..The revenue from speech recognition is too good to share so next thing to do ? Buy a cheap alternate of your current partner and fuel it with your Marketing budget . Enterprise biz of new company is just a additional market ..icing on the cake . its backward integration .

but you know what if someone launches a service like Google's Free 411 there whole plan will go for a toss . and i am sure either google or one of these Local Search startup ( JUST DIAL /ASK LAILA ) will do it .

OM should understand that problem is dependence on Voice ,any coverup through "Buying Revenue" won't help much . when you board the wrong train there is no point running in opposite direction .

VAS GUY : Buddy i seriously doubt if you have recently picked up a assignment with OM ;)

Vas-Guy

I am surprised on this one.

I never thought they had limitation on making speech recognition engine considering their work relationship with Nuance (competition of Telisma and monopoly in speech recognition world over.)

Second: After seeing website of Telsima for customer list, it does not give OM many telco customers either. Instead Telisma has diverse enterprise customer base (that too mostly in Europe, probably a noise for OM's business model , today).

Third : If this is to bring attention of global (telco?) audience to their voice portal offerings. This being a speech engine company, this has lot of baggage. mostly peers of Onmobile, Call center SI etc use this software and that is business model for a speech engine as on today.

Finally, It could be a show stealer and we are not able to see the game yet !

:)

Long Time Listner Repeat Calle

Cutting Edge VAS company ..can't think beyond Voice? No Wonder .. ET wants to call Home ...(He has got no option )

happyman

With operators continuing to have only one bright marketing idea on voice i.e. cut prices as evidenced by the recent slashing of STD tariffs, it will be interesting to see what happens to Onmobile in the 3 year window when the voice services which account for 40% of revenues drop. This is inevitable since most of their services are priced at Rs 6 per min or above and it is only a matter of time before VAS voice prices drop.

The million dollar question of course, is whether the drop in voice prices will result in a compensating volume increase and allow Onmobile to float.

Obviously, this is not lost on them, which is why the focus on WAP and the earlier acquisition of ITFinity to give them a future revenue source when data services take off.

Still, they are certainly overvalued. The stock market & turbulence - no one quite has an explanation for them.

Well done Onmobile is all one can say I guess!