Cognex Corporation

Greetings and welcome to Cognac's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone requires operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Nathan McCurran, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Our press release was published yesterday after market close, and our annual report on Form 10-K for 2024 was filed this morning. The press release, earnings presentation, and 10-K are available on the investor relations section of our website. Both our published materials and the call today will reference non-GAAP measures. You can find a reconciliation of certain items from GAAP to non-GAAP in our press release and earnings presentation. Any forward-looking statements we made in the press release, the accompanying presentation posted to our website, or any that we may make during this call are based upon information that we believe to be true as of today. Our actual results may differ from our projections due to the risks and uncertainties that are described in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K. On today's call, Rob Willett, Cognex's President and CEO, will discuss end-market trends and provide an update on our strategic initiatives. Dennis Fair, Cognex's CFO, We'll discuss our fourth quarter financial results, and we'll conclude with our outlook. With that, I'll turn the call over to Rob.

Thanks, Nathan. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We began 2024 with the strategic priorities of infusing AI into more of our products and tools, transforming and expanding our sales force, and integrating Moratex, our largest acquisition in company history. I am pleased with the progress we made against these strategic priorities in 2024. We expanded our portfolio of machine vision products powered by world-class AI. A couple of highlights include the industry's first AI-enabled 3D smart camera, the Insight L38, and the addition of the modular vision tunnel portfolio. featuring the powerful DataMan 380 barcode reader that uses improved decoding, optimized for logistics applications to minimize footprint, maximize depth of field, and read the smallest codes. We successfully executed our sales transformation, deploying a new type of sales node to broaden our sales reach to customers we have not traditionally served. And we successfully integrated our largest ever acquisition, Maritex, which gives us a more complete machine vision solution and contributes positively to our bottom line. This transaction was accretive to adjusted EPS in 2024, which led to a slight increase in adjusted EPS for the year in an otherwise soft market. In 2024, our logistics and semiconductor businesses gained momentum, but conditions across our broader factory automation business remained challenging. Most of these markets stabilized throughout the year. Despite a slight improvement in relevant macro leading indicators, such as PMI, we still characterize our core factory automation markets as soft, but stable for now. The exception continues to be automotive, where we saw a pronounced step down in 2024. Coming into the year, we expected automotive to grow, helped by significant EV battery spending. But this investment dropped off throughout the year, leading automotive to be our weakest end market in 2024. We continue to see uncertainty in auto as we begin 2025. These mixed market dynamics led to overall revenue growth of 9%, or 1% excluding Morotex, for the full year. Throughout 2024, while we continued to invest in long-term growth initiatives, we stayed disciplined in our approach to discretionary spending and thoughtful about hiring. I now want to provide you with a more detailed update on our strategic initiatives. We are seeing rapid changes in technology with powerful chips accelerating AI innovation. For industrial machine vision, this means moving beyond the world of rules-based algorithms towards a more sophisticated suite of powerful artificial intelligence tools. Transformer models are overtaking convolutional neural networks as the foundation of deep learning. As this shift accelerates, customers will need significantly less data to train and configure our products, and we'll be able to ramp up and scale production faster. This will allow machine vision to address more applications and reach more customers. Cognex is defining the leading edge of this shift in industrial machine vision technology by launching industry-leading products that leverage AI to solve customers' problems. Our new products address the full spectrum of machine vision applications. At one end of the spectrum, new AI allows us to excel at the most complex and difficult inspection tasks. While at the other, it allows us to develop products that are easy to deploy and easy to use. In December, we launched Vision Pro Deep Learning 4.0, illustrated on page four of our presentation. This powerful software designed to tackle the most difficult problems in machine vision is Cognex's first ever product to utilize transformer models. Transformer technology, which forms the core of sophisticated large language models such as ChatGPT, can help to vastly reduce the number of images required to train and implement a machine vision model. VisionPro Deep Learning 4.0's signature few sample mode achieves high levels of accuracy on some of the most sophisticated inspections after training on as few as 10 images. Previous versions would have required hundreds of images to train a vision model with such capability. This is very valuable for customers who require high accuracy but do not have large training data sets. which is often the case as they scale up their production. It is also important for customers whose production cycles are only a few months long and therefore require effective models to be ready in weeks. Few sample mode saves customers time collecting, labeling, and managing image data, which has historically been a costly process. We have also expanded our data man series to address more applications for customers looking for easy to use products. As illustrated on page five, our new data man series makes identifying and tracking parts and packages across the facility easier than ever. Regardless of industry, code quality, or application complexity, embedded AI in these next generation readers helps deliver exceptional read rate for reliable performance at every stage of production. Our latest data man products are examples of the products that allow us to get our highly advanced, powerful technology into the hands of customers with less machine vision experience. We continue to tap into this broader customer base by investing to transform and expand sales coverage. Moving to page six of the earnings presentation, We are enthusiastic about the progress of our sales transformation in 2024. Our first class of new salesnoids continued to ramp with Q4 representing their highest quarter of bookings to date, leading to over 3,000 new customers acquired by this group in 2024. These entry-level salesnoids are also continuing to gain strong traction in referrals of more complex vision systems to our more technical and advanced salesnoids. The second cohort of new salesnoids entered the field recently, and we expect this to further grow our customer base in 2025. We remain confident in the long-term value of our sales transformation strategy, allowing us to serve more customers with easy-to-use products. We're excited to continue this strategy and introduce a new cohort of SalesNoids each year. As we plan for future years, we will be flexible about cohort sizes and be responsive to market conditions. Turning now to what we are seeing across our end markets, which you will find on page seven of the earnings presentation. I will discuss the end market results for the year, excluding the contribution of Moritex. End markets have been mixed, as we have seen both continued softness as well as pockets of growth. Starting with logistics, revenue grew 20% in 2024. We continue to see broad momentum in logistics from global e-commerce leaders, as well as regional e-commerce, retail and parcel and post providers. Market growth has improved as large e-commerce players returned to capacity expansion and broader logistics remains an under-penetrated market. We believe we also gained share with recent product innovations, including the success of the modular vision tunnel and DataMan 3AD launched last year. Moving on to automotive. revenue in automotive was down 14% year on year. We continue to see declines in EV battery investment and tentativeness in large capital projects across the broader automotive business. Coming into the year, we expected strong growth in EV battery investment and for it to be one of our largest growth engines. But as the year progressed, we saw delays, reductions, and cancellations of EV battery projects. We still expect EV battery to be a long-term growth driver, but likely not in 2025. Consumer electronics revenue was down 5% year-on-year as smartphone design changes remained limited, and we saw conservative capex spending across the market. Consumer electronics has positive long-term trends, Currently, our expectations for near-term investment in consumer electronics are tempered, but we tend to have a better line of sight to this by early Q2 each year. So we will give you another update on our next earnings call. Lastly, SEMI is continuing to build with significant year-on-year growth, albeit off a low 2023 base. Growth is widespread across SEMI with investment increases from major machine builders, but we have seen strong demand driven by high bandwidth memory chip investments. As we kick off 2025, we expect momentum to continue in logistics and SEMI, automotive to remain weak, and other factory automation growth to be relatively in line with macro indicators such as PMI. We continue to see disruptive trends playing out in our markets. AI technology is making our products more accessible to an increasing number of customers and applications. We lead the industry in making machine vision technology usable by industrial customers at scale. With this, we can automate more inspection tasks and grow the machine vision market, both by solving more of our sophisticated customers' most challenging problems but also by making our powerful technology accessible for those less experienced in automation. Let me now hand it over to Dennis to walk you through the financial results and the outlook for the first quarter.

Thank you, Rob. Our quarterly financial highlights can be found on page 8 of our earnings presentation posted to our investor website yesterday. Fourth quarter revenue of $230 million finished at the high end of our guidance range and increased 17% year on year. Excluding Moritex, revenue grew by 12%. As we have now passed the one year anniversary of the close of our Moritex acquisition, I will note that this will be the last quarter we speak to revenue trends, excluding this part of our business. From a geographic viewpoint, excluding Moritex, Year-on-year revenue grew double digits in both the Americas, led by continued logistics strengths and compounded by accelerated demand in the quarter, and in other Asia, led by semiconductor. Europe declined slightly due to weaker automotive spending. Year-on-year revenue growth in the quarter was strongest in Greater China, driven by project timing in consumer electronics, as well as an easy year-ago comparison. While China revenue has grown year-on-year the past two quarters, we remain cautious about the overall outlook for this market, which continues to see both significant uncertainty and heightened competitive pressure. Turning to margins. Adjusted gross margin was 69.4% in Q4, down 130 basis points from 70.7% a year ago, driven by more attacks, negative mix from higher logistics revenue, and to a lesser extent, pricing headwinds, most pronounced in China. Adjusted operating expenses increased 3% year-on-year in the quarter. The increase was driven by Moritex, as well as investment in our Salesforce transformation and expansion. As a result of reallocation and adjustment to our employee base, we incurred $3 million of reorganization costs in the quarter, that are excluded from our non-GAAP metrics. Even with our investment in Salesforce expansion, ending headcount for this year was 3% below year-ago levels, and we continue to focus on tight cost management. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 18.5% in Q4, above the high end of our guidance and up nearly 6 percentage points from 12.6% a year ago. Revenue growth and tight cost management drove high incremental EBITDA margin despite cross-margin pressure. Diluted earnings per share on a gap basis was $0.16, up from $0.07 in Q4 of 2023. Adjusted diluted EPS was $0.20, up from $0.11 year-on-year. Both increases were due to a higher revenue and higher margins. Driven by working capital optimization, we delivered strong free cash flow for the second quarter in a row in Q4, totaling $49 million compared to $7 million in Q4 of 2023. Cognex returned $57 million to shareholders in the quarter. $43 million of share repurchase was our highest quarterly total since Q1 2022, and we intend to continue to be opportunistic with our stock buyback. I will also briefly cover our full year 2024 results, which can be found on page 9 of our presentation. 2024 revenue of $915 million grew 9% year-on-year on 1% excluding Moritex. Geographically, for the full year excluding Moritex, other Asia delivered the highest revenue growth due to SEMI. In addition, the Americas grew moderately, Europe declined slightly, and China declined more materially in the year. Adjusted gross margin was 69.3% in 2024, down 3.2 percentage points due to Moritex, unfavorable mix, and to a lesser extent, pricing. For the full year, adjusted operating expense increased 6%, driven primarily by Moritex, as well as our Salesforce transformation efforts. Adjusted EBITDA margin declined 140 basis points to 17.1% in 2024 due to lower gross margins and higher operating expense associated with our sales transformation. GAAP diluted earnings per share of 62 cents declined 6% year-on-year, partially due to a higher effective tax rate. Adjusted diluted EPS of 74 cents was up from 73 cents in 2023 as the accretion from Moritex, offset softness and factory automation for the full year. Total free cash flow in 2024 was $134 million, representing 105% conversion of adjusted net income. We returned $119 million to our shareholders in the year and ended the year with $587 million in cash and investments and no debt. I will now turn to our outlook for the first quarter on page 10 of our presentation. In the first quarter, we expect revenue between $200 and $220 million. This range continues to be reflective of a mixed and volatile macro backdrop. At the midpoint, this represents revenue aligned with Q1 2024, reflecting our expectation of continued growth in logistics and semiconductor offset by weaker automotive and an approximately $5 million FX headwind. The expected sequential stepdown is driven by the acceleration in demand from customers in Q4 and an anticipated $4 million FX headwind in the first quarter. You also expect adjusted gross margin to remain in the high 60% range. Sequentially, mix is expected to be a slight headwind. Expect adjusted EBITDA margin between 12% and 15%. The midpoint of this range represents 150 basis point increase year-on-year driven by operating leverage and operating expense discipline. Lastly, we're excited to hold our Cognex investor day this year on June 9th and June 10th at our Boston area headquarters, and we hope to see you there. Now, we will open the call for questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad at this time. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. We do ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Again, that's star 1 to register a question at this time. Today's first question is coming from Damien Karras of UBS. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everyone.

Good morning, Damien. Good morning.

Yeah, thanks for all the color around the end market. Rob, I wanted to ask you about autos. I know you've talked in the past about this being the worst market environment you've ever experienced in your career. And I know you expect autos to also continue to be your weakest market this year. But what's your assessment on, you know, how much lower that customer spend could possibly go from here? I mean, the business segment was down, you know, 14% in 2024. Are you kind of thinking like double digit declines again in 2025? Or should, you know, we'd be thinking much more modest declines from here?

Well, Damien, I think you paint the picture well. It was a very, very tough year last year for automotive and our business there in automotive. We entered the year very enthusiastic about what we saw going on in EV and EV battery manufacturing. And to give you a sense of the magnitude of that, I think coming in, we're aggressive at Cognix. We have stretch goals. to really drive a lot of business into EV battery where we have just some great technology. And I think where we ended up relative to where we came on was on the order of $50 million Delta. So that was kind of the most difficult thing that we encountered coming into the year. You know, and obviously, you know, that continued as the year went along. Now we think it's going to continue to be a bad year for automotive, but I don't think one on the order of decline that we saw in 2024. There are some reasons to be optimistic about automotive, right? We do great things in automotive when EV battery comes back, when capacity is more utilized and investment returns. And what we're able to do in that space is very good. And certainly Cognexus technology in the area of sensors on the car, electronics in the car, and some of our new technology, what it can do in inspection in the cars, are exciting growth areas for us. And we have a sense that an investment might start to return to that market in 2026. which then might lead to sort of a pickup for business for us later in the year. But we don't give full year guidance. We're not optimistic that we're going to see a good year, but I'm hoping that the time of serious decline for us in automotive is over.

That's really helpful. And then I wanted to ask you about consumer electronics, which was down for the second year in a row in 2024. And I know you said you'll have better insights. you know, when the second quarter earnings comes around. But I wanted to ask you, you know, your slides, you mentioned kind of limited change to form factors. What's your sense for that aspect, you know, this coming year? You know, do you think that there should be more consumer electronic product changes this coming year compared to the past few years?

So consumer electronics revenue fell 5% for Cognex last year, excluding Maritex. That said, it did grow in the back half due to project timing and some strength that we saw coming. It's really difficult and too early to call Cognex's year in electronics, and I will give you more color on that at our next earnings call. You know, there were reasons that we feel confident that in the long run, consumer electronics will be a great growth market for us and will continue to be. The issue is always on, you know, when do these things occur? There are a lot of great new features planned, a lot of innovation coming, whether it's in smartphones or in wearable devices or in other electronics such as smartphones. augmented reality, virtual reality type technology that I think many of our customers are working hard to try to bring to market. And if and when those are successful and need to be manufactured on a massive scale, I'm very confident that companies will turn to Cognix to help them do that. There's also a lot of human inspection going on in huge amounts of human inspection going on in consumer electronics manufacturing and I refer you to some of the comments I made in my prepared remarks earlier on, you know, our newer technology, particularly transformer technology, allows us to meet the needs of some of those customers very well by allowing them to implement our technology quickly and to get great results, which makes payback much, much faster. And to give you a little context of that, if you think of electronics, often it's a very, very rapid scaling up and a relatively short period of manufacturing at huge scales. So this technology in that market, I think, can be very, very valuable and I think is already being seen to be so by some of our customers in the space. So that's kind of the overview. But to give you a direct answer to your question, too soon to say, let's regroup here in about 13 weeks.

Understood. Really appreciate your thoughts. Best of luck out there.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, due to the number of callers for today, we are asking you to please limit yourself to one question and one related follow-up if needed. The next question is coming from Tommy Mull of Stevens. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. Hey, Tommy. Hey, Tommy. Rob, I want to start on logistics and ask, What insight you can provide there on the breadth of the strength, whether that's in terms of the geographies, the sub verticals, I'm thinking e-commerce versus parcel perhaps, and then the durability of this strength. I mean, there were multiple quarters there where I guess we were in an absorption phase for a lot of the capacity built out during the pandemic. Does it feel like we're solidly back into a period where we need more capacity or how would you situate us?

Yeah, Tommy, I think you're right in pointing out that, you know, we saw our logistics business peak in 2021 where, you know, there was huge, huge investment. And then we've been through a period of absorbing that investment. And then we're now back to a period of growth, you know, logistics business grew 20% year on year last year with strength really, you know, across pretty much everywhere, right? US, Europe, other Asia. And then as we, as we look, In terms of customer tiers, I would say we made good progress in base logistics, seeing some nice growth in that space. We've made great progress with very large e-commerce players. And then, as you might expect, there's sort of a group more large customers, some of whom didn't grow with us last year and others of them did. you know, specifically, you know, in the U.S., a couple of customers who I think, you know, are struggling with their own retail supply chain and execution of various things, you know, so didn't put up growth. But those are really very few exceptions to what is a very broad and underlying return to growth. We're positive, very positive about our logistics business and what we're seeing happening. We do see more capacity being added. We do see a lot of technology being invested in this industry, whether it is vision technology and certainly beyond barcode reading, which is a very difficult thing. We do very well, but there's much, much more to be done, and we're seeing more and more traction with that. New customer activity is strong. We're bringing more data management with our edge intelligence platform to this space. And then, as you rightly note, the parcel and post sector is an area we see growth in. I did spend a lot of last week in Europe visiting a lot of parcel and post businesses in that space. I would say they're not overly enthusiastic about the investment environment in parcel and post currently, but I don't think that is going to be a headwind to our opportunity to grow in that space. These are really newer customers for us us newer technology so we're coming off a low base and we have a lot to offer but it's worth keeping in mind some of those possible and post companies have you know five-year capital spending plans that you know we're we've been starting to muscle in on now for a number of years and uh you know we'll play out i think over time uh another thing to point out of course is geographic expansion is exciting for us the highest growth rates we see and would expect to see are markets outside the U.S. where we have strong penetration. It's really more in markets where they're really starting to really drive e-commerce fulfillment and spend significantly on a consumer base that's becoming wealthier and spending more money online. And I'm thinking of markets like India and Indonesia where we're making some great progress.

Thank you, Rob. As a follow-up, and perhaps this is for Dennis, I wanted to ask about what you would highlight for us in terms of OpEx discipline, Dennis. So you've sketched the contours previously on the level of investment for the emerging customer initiative. So I'm thinking elsewhere in the OpEx budget, what can you highlight us, whether quantifying or just speaking qualitatively about a philosophy on cost management there? Thank you.

Yeah, no, absolutely happy to do that. I think, as we said in our prepared remark, we're very focused on tight cost management and keep on looking for areas where we can drive efficiencies throughout the organization. And I think a positive thing I really would like to highlight is that we invested successfully into our emerging customer initiative into the sales transformation last year. But at the same time, Our OPEX year-over-year for the full year grew by 6%, and revenue grew 9%. So that means OPEX growth was below the revenue growth in 2024. And maybe to help you think a bit about 2025, what we expect is that we will see the OPEX growth also below the revenue growth in 2025. Thank you, Dennis.

I'll turn it back.

Thank you. The next question is coming from Andrew Biscaglia of BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. Good morning, Andrew. I just want to get an update into your end on the emerging customer initiative. In terms of your expectations, it seems like it's going well. And do you care to provide any context around incremental revenue from the strategy going forward? Maybe in 25.

Yeah, thanks. Um, so yeah, I think you've characterized it well, you know, this has been a major initiative for Cognix. We've, you know, onboarded and got up to, to, um, you know, improve the productivity of a large first cohort of, um, emerging customer salespeople. Um, their, their performance in Q4, I think was in line or better than what we had, um, you know, expected and communicated to you at the last call. They've completed over 80,000 customer visits in 2024, adding over 3,000 customers, you know, achieving, you know, bookings rate around a million dollars a week. And then, you know, referring significant business to the rest of our sales team that's turning into, you know, larger, more sophisticated opportunities for customers. So we're really, you know, starting to see much better penetration of the market. But this is just the beginning, right? And... We hired the second cohort as we went through last year, and they're now entering the field. And they're going to really help us expand our sales coverage. So I think we can sort of be cut and pasting the numbers we saw with the first cohort, but hopefully doing better because we're getting better and we're understanding how to do this more. And then I would say, and I think as I communicated, we've adjusted how we're managing them and what we're doing based on what we've learned and And so they're better integrated with our existing Salesforce now, and so better able to cover accounts, some larger accounts where we've been really under-penetrated. They're making more calls on different customer profiles within those large accounts. And then we're also giving them really great new technology, and I think the best example would be the DataMan 290 and 390 series that is now in their hands, great AI technology that's easy to sell and easy to use. And this Salesforce was designed with technology like that in mind. So that's our playbook that we will continue to iterate on as we go through future cohorts. I think in terms of other things, the business that we're winning has over 75% gross margin. So it's, again, as we expected in that regard. then, yeah, so, you know, you ask about 2025, and, you know, I think we're going to see, you know, that continue, you know, our progress continue, and we've got the metrics and the way to manage it, and, you know, we continue to be pleased.

And maybe just to add on that to your specific question on the incremental side, right, we've been talking in the last earnings call, and Rob said also just before that we really integrated that that these sales noise, these entry-level sales noise into the larger sales organization and let them go to also to existing customers. In that regard, we're not really able to give you like a number. Here's what is incremental. Like Rob said, we're tracking their bookings metrics and other sales efficiency KPIs very closely. But just that one particular question, we just can't answer you in that way. So I hope that gives you a bit more color to that as well.

TAB, Mark McIntyre, Okay, and whether we're guided to growth margins, the high 60s and where the biggest levers there that. TAB, Mark McIntyre, could provide some tailwind to the margins going above 70% again is it is really just volume coming back or can this emerging customer initiative have an impact in 25 on gross margins already.

I'll kick off, you know, at a high level, but then I'll throw it to Dennis to give you more details. So, you know, the wonder of Cognex is, you know, implementing great technology to, you know, factory automation and logistics. You know, we've got a lot of great technology coming, and the DataMan 290 is an example of that for sure. And then all the sales force that we have now in the field making, you know, tens of thousands of sales calls to sell it should be, you know, a tailwind for us, you know, as a as we move forward. And then, you know, there is certainly a volume story, you know, where, you know, we've seen volumes not growing anywhere near our expectations over the last few years. You know, we've built an infrastructure ready to supply a much larger business. And, you know, as that business comes, you know, and as markets recover, certainly the fall through on incremental revenue should be high.

Right. And... We guided for the first quarter to the high 60s, so pretty much in line to what we have guided previously. In the near term, there are certainly some effects that we have strong growth in logistics, which typically is slightly dilutive to the gross margin, so there's a bit of a mixed headwind on that side. Certainly, the growth in logistics has a fantastic flow through to the bottom line. You have seen, if you look back at Q4, with the coming out at the high end of the revenue range, we had a nice earning speed. In that regard, if you think about the logistics impact to the total P&L, very positive on the bottom line, but certainly in the near, it's a slight headwind towards gross margin. But then, as Rob said, in the long term, the sales transformation, sales expansion of coverage is a nice measure to bring up gross margin with the incremental or the accretive cross-margin we are getting from that initiative. We have strong leverage also in terms of using the infrastructure. We have new MPIs, right? We talked in the prepared remarks about like the DM290, for example, that product family. So they're really areas where we can drive cross-margin increases, and that's really what we'll be focused on in the mid to long term. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you. The next question is coming from Jamie Cook of Truist Securities.

Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. I guess two questions. One, Rob, just on the total market serve, the $6.5 billion that you guys have put out there, just wondering, understanding you probably still feel comfortable with that number. I'm just wondering if perhaps as you're thinking going forward, do we pivot which end markets we want to focus on, perhaps markets that are less cyclical like you know, automotive or consumer electronics, maybe focusing more on, you know, medical or other markets so that I just get your sales over time can be less cyclical versus some of the markets that you focus on. So wondering if there'll be a pivot there over time. And then I guess my second question, obviously you're still sitting with a very strong balance sheet sitting in, you know, net cash with more techs behind you. I'm just wondering, you know, what your appetite is or the environment is for, you know, acquisitions in 2025 relative to where we sat in 2024. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Let me talk about, you know, our markets and how we think about that and volatility and opportunity within them first, and then I'll ask Dennis to address, you know, the second part of your question about capital. So we'll give you an update on our view of our serve markets in June at the Analyst Day. I... I think I look forward to sharing that with you and our view about how we expand them. Obviously, we did expand with the acquisition of Martex and their adjacencies and other markets we're moving into where we see opportunities to grow that serves market, and we'll give you more color on that. In terms of where our interests lie and how to think about volatility within those markets, We see our logistics market is still our largest served market and the one we expect to grow fastest. That was true when we last gave you an update, and it's still true today very much that those are exciting growth markets for us and will continue to be a great focus of innovation and investment. And so that's exciting. And witness the modular vision tunnel progress we're making with parcel and host companies you know, a great success with the technology leaders in that space. And we think that has a long way to run. In terms of other markets, what I would say is, you know, I think we all understand that Cognex is highly indexed on the technology leaders and the big leaders, the premier customers in our markets, whether it's automotive or consumer electronics, right? And those tend to have more – they tend to put more volatility – into our business overall. But our emerging customer initiative really allows us to broaden our customer base, going from serving about 30,000 customers as we do to going down more into more mid-tier and more entry-level customers and really broadening that. So we would expect that to take some volatility out of our business in the future. And with volatility, you can see that we can underperform in difficult periods and outperform, as I think we did in the fourth quarter as a result of some very strong relationships we have in some very good markets. But that's not ideal in terms of running a stable business. And I think the emerging customer program allows us to do that quite well. You asked about other markets, medical, which in a big bag of medical businesses, including, you know, pharmaceutical, life science, medical device, representing about 10% of our business overall. Those markets haven't been good, you know, over the last few years since COVID. I'm confident, I think everyone is, that they will return to growth. And that's the type of market, again, where we will be having much more sales activity as a result of our emerging customer sales force. And much more appropriate products for the level of technical expertise that those industries have to adopt them. So I would expect over time that we would see smaller markets, packaging related, medical, even aerospace markets where we've been very under-penetrated, but we're seeing some nice progress in terms of activity. And as those markets recover, hopefully a broader base of customers with less volatility.

Let me take it from here in regards to the M&A question. Maybe I start first with a quick summary of the overall capital strategy and then talk a bit more about M&A specifically. So on overall capital strategy, I've been always saying like our number one area is our organic investments. Think about like the sales transformation and sales expansion, which we're investing into. And second comes M&A, third share buybacks, and fourth the dividends. So it's kind of the order of priorities. It means M&A quite high in that stack, and we have been coming out of the Moritech acquisition, which I think we feel extremely positive and successful about. We talked about how it has helped to be a creative to adjust the DPS and bring actually it up by a penny there. So in that regard, I think we made very good success story on the Moritech side. And that clearly means like that we are looking for continued M&A, but it's also clear that we're looking for quality deals. And that means we'll be thoughtful when we are making these decisions. And at the same time, I think there's probably a lot further to discuss where probably doesn't have the time right now, but I'm really looking forward to continue a bit more in this conversation. at our investor day so we can talk then a bit more about like, hey, what could be potential markets? How do we think about like the balance sheet in that regard? So a lot of good topics to cover there, and I think we'll address these at investor day.

Thank you. Very helpful.

Thank you. The next question is coming from Piyush Abbasi of Citi. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Hey, good morning. So the current US administration appears to be more pro-US manufacturing. Speaking with your customers across the auto or consumer electronics and markets, have you at least begun to see a step up in conversations where your customers are talking about reshaping their manufacturing footprint and maybe adopting more automation and machine vision?

Yeah, thanks for the question. I would say there's certainly an increase of discussion and interest around that topic, no question. And I think every manufacturer in America is thinking very much about the risks and upside associated with tariffs and other actions that are going on. I would put a little in the context, though, that there's just a huge amount of uncertainty and confusion. So I think it's not... That sort of interest isn't really leading to, I think, action at the moment. It's leading to confusion and hopefully we'll see more clarity and then more actually, you know, action. But maybe to give you a little context, you know, if we think about Q4 performance and Q1 guidance, I think there was a lot, you know, quite a lot of excitement and positivity that we saw in the back end of last year, really post-election. in November and December, which did account for some higher spending. In prior years, I might have called it budget flush type spending that went on in November and December in America's really only, I'd say. And I might size that about $6 to $7 million of business that I think we received in Q4 as a result of that enthusiasm that really came straight out of Q1. So I think there's that. We do have FX. you know, is I think a worry in general for companies where, you know, the strength of the U.S. dollar is a $5 million or so headwind for us in Q1 as well. So, you know, and then there are a lot of policy changes, obviously. When we were talking a year ago, there was, you know, a lot of enthusiasm about the Isolation Reduction Act and other things. Clearly, there's a lot more confusion about that. So certainly that's all at play. I do think if we see major investment in manufacturing and major onshoring going on in the United States, Cognix should be a major beneficiary of that given our strength in this market.

helpful uh i was a bit late on the call so maybe address this but i think you highlighted pricing challenges in the quarter particularly competing in the china regions uh can you update us on on that like how would you characterize the pricing environment as it doesn't seem that the demand outlook has changed much and are competitors in other regions being disciplined from a pricing standpoint or are you seeing more incidents of lowering prices to win contracts

I would say we've been talking for a few quarters now about the pricing dynamic in China. China certainly is an extremely competitive market for us and our customers. So I don't think there's much change to report from that situation in the last quarter compared to what we're generally seeing. But China is a market where there are strong and emerging competitors in our industry and to us Specifically, I think everyone's been seeing this as an extremely difficult market. Some of the larger players that we see, you know, emerging state-owned enterprises have actually been cost-cutting and reducing some of their spend. So certainly they're feeling the sort of pain that we're seeing in that market. Our strategy, you know, taking, you know, a leaf out of the innovator's dilemma is we want to maintain share, you know, and we want to maintain customers and share as we go through this in China. You know, we have, you know, very strong technology and good gross margins, even at difficult prices. So, you know, we're willing to take a hit to pricing to maintain share. And that's been, you know, that's been the situation it continues to be. As we bring, you know, new technology to market, you know, we're hopeful that we'll have bigger deltas that we can assert, you know, the data man 290 being an example of something we might see in that space. But I'd say, you know, in terms of the pricing discussion, it's a very distant gross margin topic compared to some of the volume things that hit our gross margin or the dilution of vortex, you know, which we're getting to grips with and should improve also.

Dennis, what would you add? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think if you think about be it both 2024 as a full year or Q1, and Q4 specifically, I think really the biggest topics we have seen working in the gross margin is really more attacks and then mixed effects like the strong growth of logistics. And it's also very clearly that like a volume plays a big role as well, right? So that means we have infrastructure and fixed costs are there, so higher volume or lower volume really drives leverage there. And then pricing is really the fourth item there in the stack, which is really to a lesser extent, but it's very clearly that we are seeing these dynamics and therefore wanted to be transparent and clear about it, what we are seeing, and that's particularly in China, and I think Rob covered that well.

I appreciate all the color guys. Good luck.

Thank you. The next question is coming from Jacob Levinson of Milius Research. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. Just to attack the M&A side of things from a different angle, I know you folks have bought some really interesting machine learning assets. Sue a lot and pretty before I was cool, so to speak, as the as as the rise of AI and the broader public consciousness. So does that increase the competition for those types of deals or are they just are they just too niche for most buyers that would be looking at the things they interest you guys?

So Jake, to be clear on your question, you're asking kind of, are those assets still out there? How are they kind of priced and how are we thinking about them?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, excuse me, you know, we at Cognix, we really excel at finding the best technology for our kind of, you know, specific market industrial machine vision. We're very well known. We have a great reputation and we cultivate. the companies, the small companies that we think are doing great work. And, you know, Vidi is a great example of that, really an excellent Swiss-based company with some phenomenal engineers doing things that when we really got to understand them blew us away and we were delighted to acquire them. So I think, you know, that was eight years ago, I guess. And, you know, I think probably that the general investor community, you know, saw the potential for advanced technology in manufacturing. So there are a lot of companies that kind of were very heavily invested in, you know, in the years following that time that are now, I'd say, kind of for sale. And, you know, so there's a lot of them to see. But a note of caution is when we really get in and look at those companies, you know, they may have raised $50 million of capital on a business plan to have sales of, you And their sales are, you know, 10% of that amount. And they're really more around consulting or other things. They really haven't achieved the potential that they expected. So I think the valuation, you know, of those companies is not what people thought they would be five years ago, which is an opportunity for Cognix because some of them have good technology they haven't been able to bring to market. But certainly the kind of the realism about what they actually have and where they are is one I would say is a strong theme. that I would observe overall. And I think it kind of underscores that to play well in our market, it's not enough to have great technology. You have to understand customers. You have to have applications, engineers who really understand the application. And that's where the 3,000 or so strong cognoids that we have who are out there every day, the 30,000 customers or so who know some of them are the most sophisticated suppliers of technology, that's great opportunities for us to take technology and apply it, which isn't quite as easy as it might appear to someone who eight years ago launched off on a plan. So I'd say that's the current state of it. My hope is that some of those really good companies and great engineering teams will join Cognex over time, and there's the potential for that to happen, certainly.

Okay. I appreciate it, Rob. I'll keep it to one question today. Good luck. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. The next question is coming from Joe Ritchie of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Good morning. Hi, Joe. Good morning. So, Rob, I thought your comments on infusing AI into your tools and the fact that you now require less images to train a model were really interesting. I guess I'm just curious. On one hand, I can think of that as being a competitive advantage if you are first mover and your technology is advanced relative to others. On the other hand, it also kind of seems like it may potentially lower the barriers to entry for additional competitors, startups, maybe Chinese competitors. I'm just curious, how do you get comfortable that you can sustain your technology advantage and this isn't just going to increase competition for your end markets?

Yeah, that's a great question, Joe. Thanks so much for it. It is both a great opportunity and a potential threat for Cognex. There's no doubt about that. The technology is allowing us to do things for customers very quickly and very well that we and they couldn't do before, and it'll spread the technology more broadly within existing customers, and that's very exciting. And here it's worth pointing out that there's a lot of great public technology from Silicon Valley coming out of companies, but that technology isn't ready for industrial application. And there's a lot of expertise we have in taking publicly available models and applying them and really making them work. They don't work well when just applied, even with experienced programmers to our industry without deep domain and technology and customer knowledge that we have. I think where this technology is also really both very exciting for us, but also will change our industry is it's making machine vision much easier to apply and implement, right? And you can really see that we're leading in that space as a result of applying technology and edge learning. Deep learning went to edge learning and transformer models are in a way a future that's to almost no learning, right? And that is something that we do extremely well and are leading the industry in. But it will change the sale and it will change who we sell to and how we sell and what we provide for them. Less application engineering, more pure technology that they can implement. I would say I'm pretty optimistic about what that means for Cogmex in the next few years. I think the technology that you're seeing coming out of Silicon Valley is still going to be too hard to apply really to our customers. And the people who are going to apply it first are going to be us. And we see it kind of driving. And that's, you know, I also feel really good about the emerging customer sales force we're putting in place. You can just get that technology out to so many more users and sell it much more quickly than we have before. So that's the overall picture, but you know, we're a technology company, right? Our, the business is always, the technology is getting better and faster and easier to use prices come down, you know, applications expand, new markets appear. It's wild and Willie and fun business. And we've been doing it for 43 years. And, uh, you know, we're going to go on taking those same principles that have made us successful to this new revolution.

Thank you, Rob. I'll keep it there. Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you. The next question is coming from Ken Newman of KeyBank Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Katie Fleischer for Ken. I'll keep it short here. I just was wondering how your positioning for tariffs and any potential margin impacts from those of another trade war materializes.

Yeah, happy to take that. I would say the headline statement here is that based on the tariffs which have been announced so far, there's no material impact to COGMEX and direct on the COG side. Certainly, things are uncertain, right? More tariffs may come, but in general, of what is announced so far, no direct impact. Then, of course, there could be a secondary impact from the tariffs, right? So in the near term, again, there's a bit of uncertainty We talked about, like, we have seen a lot of positive momentum in the November-December timeframe, and that has shifted towards more near-term uncertainty in some of our customers. So I think about the automotive supply chain across Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. So that's not necessarily helpful. But then if you think about it in the mid and longer term, the reshoring opportunity for Cotnex is tremendous, right? So it means if that is really starting to happen, then there's a tremendous additional market upside for us.

Great. Thank you. I'll leave it there.

Thank you. We're showing time for one final question. Our last question today is coming from Jarm Nathan of Daiwa. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for squeezing me in here. So I just wanted to go back to your Moritex acquisition. I think when you made the acquisition, the objectives were expanding beyond Japan and using more of Moritex optics into Cognex equipment. So I just wanted to kind of understand how you guys, how it was done in the year, what's the progress. And I just had one more question, please.

Yeah, great. We're about a year and a quarter into owning Martex, and we're very pleased with how we're taking that technology and selling it to our existing customers. That's one way in which we can increase gross margin and grow our business. So that's kind of awesome. We're taking that technology to many customers, because they were very much primarily a Japanese-focused business. We're globalizing it for them. And then, you know, you're going to see more and more of it integrated into our core products. So it's, you know, a lot of good progress and increasing excitement around that.

Do you need to do any validation? Like, does it take longer to kind of get into, get more tech components into the products? Is that a bottleneck or something or?

It's something we're very used to doing. It's very sophisticated. We've got PhD photonics people and optics people who work on that, but we're very comfortable and we know how to do it.

Okay. And just finally, some of the logistics companies seem to be, especially on the parcel side, seem to be talking about moving to sensing from scanning. I just wanted to understand how would that impact if that chain kind of continues. I just wanted to understand. It could be good for you. I just wanted to understand that.

Sure. I'll keep my answer brief. But, you know, today kind of the barcode is the defining way in which packages are identified. I don't expect that to change. But certainly there is the opportunity to have more package recognition using machine vision technology. on it, right? And, you know, some packages are complicated, you know, and being able to use vision to inspect them, something we're extremely good, is somewhere that our customers would like to go. And, you know, it's certainly one, a journey we're enjoying, you know, exploring with them.

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. This brings us to the end of the question and answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Rob Willett for closing comments.

Well, thank you so much for joining us this morning. I enjoyed the discussion and we look forward to speaking with you again on next quarter's call.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation and interest in Cognex Corporation. This concludes today's event. You may disconnect your lines or log off the webcast at this time and enjoy the rest of your day.