Cognex Reports Record Results For Fiscal Year 2011

Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ: CGNX) today announced that the company set new records in 2011 for annual revenue, net income and net income per share. Selected financial data for the quarter and year ended December 31, 2011 are compared to the fourth quarter of 2010, the third quarter of 2011, and the year ended December 31, 2010 in Table 1 below.

Table 1
				Revenue					Net Income					Net Income per Diluted Share
Quarterly Comparisons
Current quarter: Q4-11				$	84,042,000				$	19,099,000				$	0.44
Prior year’s quarter: Q4-10				$	84,920,000				$	19,764,000				$	0.47
Change from Q4-10 to Q4-11					(1%)					(3%)					(6%)
Prior quarter: Q3-11				$	80,085,000				$	18,037,000				$	0.42
Change from Q3-11 to Q4-11					5%					6%					6%
Yearly Comparisons
Year ended December 31, 2011				$	321,914,000				$	69,869,000				$	1.63
Year ended December 31, 2010				$	290,691,000				$	61,381,000				$	1.52
Change from 2010 to 2011					11%					14%					7%

• In looking at the year-on-year comparisons, it should be noted that the quarter and year ended December 31, 2010 included $6.5 million of service revenue from a single factory automation customer contract that had been deferred for several years until the contract was completed. Excluding that contract, revenue for the quarter and year ended December 31, 2011 increased year-on-year by 7% and 13%, respectively. A reconciliation of revenue from GAAP to non-GAAP is shown in Exhibit 2.

“Cognex had another outstanding year in 2011,” said Dr. Robert J. Shillman, Chairman of Cognex. “We set new records for annual revenue, net income and earnings per share. Growth was driven by sales of our machine vision products in both the factory automation and surface inspection markets; in fact, we set new records for annual revenue in each of those markets. And we were highly profitable in 2011, reporting operating margins of 27% and net margins of 22%, even with the significant investments we made in new product development and expansion of our sales team.”

“We ended 2011 on a very good note,” said Robert J. Willett, Chief Executive Officer of Cognex. “Our continued strong execution in factory automation resulted in record quarterly revenue from that market in the fourth quarter. Growth was strongest in the Americas, in particular from automotive and ID products customers, and in China. We also set a new quarterly revenue record in the surface inspection market, substantially exceeding the prior record. Much of that growth came from the paper industry.”

“We believe that Cognex is well positioned as we enter 2012 to deliver on our strategic initiatives,” continued Mr. Willett. “However, that fact may not be obvious in our first quarter revenue outlook for 2012. We’ve detailed the primary reasons why in the Financial Outlook section of this press release.”