NEW MEMBER OF THE ABBYY GROUP û ABBYY EUROPE

Now itÆs ABBYY Europe who distributes FineReader and other ABBYY products in Western Europe.

Munich, 6th June 2000. ABBYY Software House announces the foundation of a new member of the ABBYY Group û ABBYY Europe (Munich, Germany). The CEO of the new company is Jupp Stoepetie, one of main MitCom shareholders, the largest ABBYY distributor in Europe. ABBYY Europe sells ABBYY products to end-users, developers and vertical markets in Western Europe. At least five employees will join the companyÆs staff this year, all five have previously been selling FineReader as MitCom employees.

Success of many ABBYY products, and especially FineReader, resulted in the foundation of ABBYY Europe, a joint venture between MitCom and ABBYY. MitCom introduced FineReader to the German market in late 1997, and within a year it had acquired a solid 10% of German OCR market. By the end of 1999, according to a rough estimation, FineReader had acquired 15% of German market and 8% of the European OCR market. This large success is due to the high quality of FineReader (FineReader 4.0 Std/Pro received 26 awards from leading international magazines worldwide since its launch in 1998) and professionalism of the MitCom team.

FineReader is now a product, which is taken by the International and European Community really seriously. This is confirmed by the fact that ABBYY was offered the chance to join a prestigious research and development consortium funded by the European Commission. 
The objective of this consortium is to develop a system that will digitize documents from the 19th and 20th century printed in old fonts like Gothic and Frakturschrift. ABBYY will be one of the principal partners in this project, as it will develop the OCR Engine that will recognize these old prints.

½It is no exaggeration to say that ABBYY has established itself as a well-known and highly regarded IT company in Europe. ABBYY is considered a very professional developer of AI software. ABBYYÆs products, and especially FineReader, are considered cutting edge technology. So we have the team, the ideas and products to conquer the market. With the foundation of ABBYY Europe we created an efficient instrument to distribute the products in Europe and we will still strengthen our marketing power and increase our market share faster than ever beforeö, said Jupp Stoepetie.

Members of ABBYY GROUP are ABBYY Software House (headquarters in Moscow), ABBYY USA (Fremont, CA), ABBYY Ukraine (Kiev) and ABBYY Europe (Munich, Germany). ABBYY Software House specializes in the development of software for optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent character recognition (ICR), linguistics, semantics, and electronic lexicography. Among ABBYY's products are: the FineReader series of OCR/ICR/OMR software, providing tools for automatic input of texts, tables and forms into a computer; FineReader Development Tools, providing developers with tools to integrate OCR into solutions of their own, ABBYY Retrieval & Morphology Engine û an SDK kit for integrating full text index, retrieval and linguistic technologies into other applications and more... FineReader 4.0 Std/Pro received 26 awards from leading IT Magazines worldwide since its launch in 1998 companies licensing ABBYY OCR/ICR technologies are Siemens Nixdorf, Samsung Electronics, Sumitomo Electric Systems, L&H/Kurzweil, Banctec (Japan), Visionshape, Jet Fax, NewSoft, and Primax. For more information about ABBYY, visit our web-site at www.abbyy.com. 

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