Nuance Communications, Inc. (NUAN)

Downthumb. Bad balance sheet. Low cash flow.

overvalued and huge depts

Great, promising technology but business model looks failing. I can not imagine that after so many acquisitions operations are efficient.

bad stock

Tech aggregators never succeed in the long run.

No earnings, debt, stock price is fairly high, posting losses and doesn't sound like they'll be making money any time soon or moving closer to positive. The product sounds good, but they already several big companies, how fast and how profitable can they grow in the future as debt weighs down. Appears one of the main appeals/uses for this technology is automated call centers, which in my experience mess up fairly frequently. May just be me but most voice identification I've seen is spotty and limited, most seem to work best with a few key words for simple/unimportant functions. Right now I just don't think it works well enough, is being used in enough applications(possibly due to cost?), or is profitable enough to justify the price.

Poor stats - must underperform

Just a feeling

The upside of this company is that it markets very heavily. The downside is, as an owner of too much of their software, their products - though they sound good - leave a lot to be desired in their performance. Their tech support is poor and expensive. Their voice recognition software is not that much better than what is available for free from microsoft. Paperport is a strong product. Their PDF converter has problems.

Great company, great technology, great products. However, with the announcement of their acquisition of eScription for 363 mill, the current price ($18+) is bound to take a knock. That's my take on it in the world of CAPs. It's still a good one to have in RL on the long finger. I'll be taking another look in a week or two, just trying to garner some points here.

Hitting ceiling at $18.75, unlikely to break through during market's current volatility

Peddling junk is right!

good

No market focus -- PDF converters, speech recognition, image analysis. They dont have enough muscle to be aggressive in 3 highly competitive markets,and their brand is going to awfully diluted. If speech recognition takes off I see them struggling versus the competition.

Also, keep in mind that even though Dragon is an excellent product, it has not been effective enough to scale speech recognition technology. In this way its no closer to 'huge' than any other player in the marketplace.

P/E = -20.1x v 15.7x for S&P 500

Price/Sales = 5.2x v 1.5x

P/CF = 84.4x v 11.6x

Profit Margin = -2.3% v 7.8%

Return on Equity = -0.8% v 15.6%

Return on Assets = -0.6% v 3.0%

Long Term Growth Rate = 42.5% v 13.0

PEG = -0.5x v. 1.4x

nuance has made so many acquisitions and mergers, but still cannot make money. wtf i need a company that growns in size but loses money in an recessionary environment. it couldnt even take advantage of the 2003-2007 expansion (tnx to credit) whereas skeleton tech companies came out of the closet and made big money. overvalued and should go much much down.

Ever come across companies' telephone contact interfaces who ask you to "SAY" your query and, on a perfect phone line, resolutely refuse to understand you no matter how slow, fast, loud, louder... you enunciate one word or number? Now try that with a cellphone.. Better? Worse? Much, much, MUCH worse?

Congratulations, you've just had the Nuance experience. Yes with a high quality mic and a very quiet environment, Dragon is tolerable, well.. just about tolerable after a LOT of training. On a phone system? Compared to a push of one DTMF key? Horribly timewasting!

Why is this company slogging along essentially flat for the year? Basically because their main stock-in-trade doesn't work too well. Yes they've sold the pup to a load of companies and the stupider of them actually make the customer rely on their speech recognition solely. A one minute call ends up as a five minute battle getting nowhere and finally, finally after wasting four minutes of your time, the "system" grudgingly starts to listen for DTMF tones. If you get to a human, how polite are you then? What's your opinion of the bozos who put you through four minutes of 100' proof frustration?

So if the public is getting cheesed off with nuance' product, how many of them are potential customers for nuance' software?

Dragon sells slowly, needs loads of freebies to get any interest. I've had four last time, buy now offers, every single one goes away for a week or so then starts all over again with the same price and maybe another shareware style freebie. I'm not suggesting shorting NUAN, I AM suggesting avoiding it! Could it be bought out? Maybe but who'd want their main product line?

Just sold this. Price static

No earnings! Its overvalued. Big competitors in MS, etc