Cognex Corporation

Greetings and welcome to Cognix fourth quarter 2018 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, John Kern, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good evening, everyone. I'm John Curran, Cognex's CFO, and I would like to welcome you to our fourth quarter earnings conference call. With me on today's call are Dr. Bob Shillman, Cognex's Chairman, and Rob Willett, Cognex's President and CEO. Please note that our earnings release and Form 10-K are available on the Cognex website at www.cognex.com. Both contain detailed information about our financial results. During the call, we may use a non-GAAP financial measure if we believe it is useful to investors or if we believe it will help investors better understand our results or business trends. You can see a reconciliation of certain items from GAAP to non-GAAP and exhibit two of the earnings released. Any forward-looking statements we made in the earnings release, or any that we may make during this call, are based upon information that we believe to be true as of today. Things can change, however, and actual results may differ materially from those projected or anticipated. You should refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K, for a detailed list of these risk factors. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dr. Bob.

Thanks, John. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. And I hope it's still culturally acceptable to say Happy Valentine's Day. But if that offended anyone, I will immediately take responsibility for that and issue a dramatic apology. Tonight, we reported record fourth quarter and full year results from continuing operations for revenue, for net income and for earnings per share. And as we expected and reported to you on our last call, our growth rate did slow at the end of 2018 because of slower spending by customers, particularly in China. And you'll hear more about that detail later in the call. I'll now turn the call over to my partner, Rob Willett, who will provide much more detail into our 2018 results. Rob, the microphone is yours.