Cognex Corporation

Greetings. Welcome to the Cognex fourth quarter 2019 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 this conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to our host, Susan Conway, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you and good evening, everyone. I'm Susan Conway, Senior Director of Investor Relations. With us today are Cognex's Chairman, Dr. Bob Shillman, President and CEO, Rob Willis, Vice President and Corporate Controller, Laura MacDonald, and Cognex's Treasurer, Chris Dagnall. I'd like to point out that our earnings released in our annual report on Form 10-K are available on our investor relations website at www.cognex.com forward slash investor. Both contain highly detailed information about our financial results. During the quarter, we may use a non-GAAP financial measure if we believe it is useful to investors are we believe it will help investors better understand our business results. You can see a reconciliation of certain items from GAAP to non-GAAP and Exhibit 2 of the earnings release. Any forward-looking statements that 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 often 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, now I'd like to turn the call over to Dr. Bob.

Thanks, Sue, and hello, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter of 2019 year-end earnings conference call. You know, normally I'd say I was pleased to report record fourth quarter net income and earnings per share. But this time, records in net income and EPS were only achieved because of a substantial discrete tax item in Q4 that combined, there are a number of them, to benefit net income by $61 million. Unfortunately, without those discrete items, Q4 revenue, net income, and EPS all decreased, both year on year and sequentially. due to ongoing weaknesses in many of the industrial markets that we serve. I'll turn the call over to my partner and Cognex's CEO, Rob Willett, who will provide details on our 2019 results. Rob, the microphone is yours.