Cognex at TD Cowen Conference: AI and Market Expansion

On Wednesday, 28 May 2025, Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ:CGNX) presented at TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2025. The company highlighted its strategic focus on machine vision technology, emphasizing both its strong position in AI applications and the challenges faced in the automotive market. Cognex’s leadership transition and market diversification were also key points of discussion.

Key Takeaways

• Rob, the current CEO, will be replaced by Matt Moschner, who brings expertise in logistics and engineering.
• Cognex aims to lead in AI applications for factory automation and machine vision.
• The company is expanding its customer base beyond the automotive industry.
• Despite a challenging automotive market, logistics and semiconductor sectors show promising growth.
• Cognex is exploring M&A opportunities in optics and sensors.

Financial Results

• Revenue exceeded $900 million.
• Adjusted EBITDA has maintained a robust 28% over the past decade.
• R&D spending accounts for approximately 15% of revenue.
• The automotive market saw a 14% decline, while the logistics market grew by 20%.
• The Emerging Customer Initiative generated $1 million in weekly sales by year-end.

Operational Updates

• Transitioned from rules-based to AI-driven systems in 2017.
• Invested $30 million in the Emerging Customer Initiative, acquiring 3,000 new customers in the first year.
• The sales force is shifting focus from automotive to more promising markets like packaging.
• Cognex is committed to enhancing customer experience with a growing customer base.

Future Outlook

• Matt Moschner will prioritize AI leadership and customer experience improvement.
• Cognex anticipates growth in semiconductor and logistics markets, with modest gains in consumer electronics.
• The EV battery market holds significant potential, although last year’s revenue expectations were not met.

Q&A Highlights

• Cognex distinguishes itself in machine vision with high industry standards.
• AI tools like GitHub Copilot are enhancing software development efficiency.
• The company’s culture promotes individual creativity and contribution.

In conclusion, Cognex’s presentation at the conference outlined a clear path forward, emphasizing innovation, market expansion, and leadership transition. For more details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2025:

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: We all set? Alright. So thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Joe Giordano. I cover industrials and industrial tech here at TD.

As you can see from every sign outside, we’re kicking off II season, so if you think we’ve earned a vote, we really appreciate it. It’s important to the company, so therefore important to me. So thank you very much for that. We can get to the the real stuff now. So really excited to have Cognex here with us and Rob, CEO.

He’s gonna kick it off with a couple minutes of a brief overview and then we’ll jump into q A. Feel free to raise your hand any time. I’ll stop and let’s make it as interactive as we can. I think it’s more interesting that way even though 0% of the chance that it ever actually happens and it ends up being just me anyway. But you have the option if you want.

Rob, thanks for being here. I’ll turn it over to you and then we’ll get going.

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Cowen, for welcoming us. And you’ve covered Cognex a long time, so appreciate that. I’ll make a few quick remarks really aimed at those who don’t know Cognex before we get into some specifics.

So Cognex is a technology growth company focused on advanced automation. So we make technology called machine vision. Think of it as the eyes that help computers see and we apply that technology to the most sophisticated manufacturers in the world, manufacturers of discrete products. Products. Some of the applications would include the manufacturing of smartphones, of medical devices, of automotive parts, of e commerce packages as they move through a sorting center and make their way to your door.

So we have about 30,000 customers that we sell to, and generally they’re among the most sophisticated manufacturers in the world. Our revenue was over 900,000,000 and over the last ten years we’ve had adjusted EBITDA of 28%. Our technology is primarily software and we spend a lot on r and d. It’s around 15% of revenue and we’re considered the technology leader in this industry that we serve. So what what is it that we do?

We we’re in the business of everything we do is around machine vision, right? So just think of your own vision for a second. You have an eye and you have a brain, right? And your eye is gathering information and your brain is making sense of it And that’s what we’re doing in the world of computer hardware. Right?

We’re we’re acquiring an image using a lens and optics and that image goes onto an imager in the form of pixels. Right? You’ve all heard of pixels. The pixels, the light hits the pixels and it creates a number or you know a lot of numbers and it sends that data, that’s the eye part of it, to the brain where cognix’s machine vision tools or algorithms make sense of it, right? So this is very sophisticated technology.

It’s been around a long time. The company’s 40 three years old. But in some ways, it’s technology that still has a long way to run, Right? And just think of your own vision again for a second. So light is changing, things are moving, this color, this vibration.

Think about a manufacturing plant where we sell into, products are moving quickly, things are changing, And it has to work at 99.99% if you’re making we think our products are used in the manufacture of about more than 2,000,000,000 products a day. So anything short of super high precision and how you make that work isn’t acceptable to those customers overall. What are generally the things that we’re doing? We think of four things we’re doing. We’re guiding.

So our technology might guide a robot to put a chip on a board or a windshield on a car. We’re identifying. So we’re reading letters and numbers or barcodes on a product. We might do that on an e commerce package or a silicon wafer in a fab. We gauge, which means we measure.

So we might look at an automotive part and say, is that groove in the brake pad the right width and depth? Right? And finally, we inspect. We look at something and say, you know, is that bottle cap correctly on that product? Is that pharmaceutical pill chipped or damaged?

Is that smartphone case presenting to the customer the way it should? The final thing I want you to know about Cognex is we have a very strong culture. Right? We refer to our culture as work hard, play hard, move fast. Right?

And we’re kind of famous for our Halloween celebrations, for we celebrate leap year by inviting Cognoids. We call ourselves Cognoids to jump out of a plane with the founder with a parachute on. Don’t worry. We have a lot of we have a lot of fun. Look at our annual report if if if you don’t believe me.

With

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: Let’s do it. So like you said, machine vision been a long been around a long time. I’ve been covering a long time even, like, when you just started really ramping up with some of these big markets that you’re in now. But I feel like over the last like decade or so, the rate of change has increased dramatically. So maybe how would you describe the landscape over the last kind of decade?

How that’s kind of played out?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yeah. And you really you’re talking about the technology, you’re talking about the use case I think

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: it’s both.

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Right? Yeah. I think it is. Both. I think it is.

So so so there’s a there’s been a big change that’s going on in the world of computers and that’s from what I’ll call rules based to AI. Right? And and so Cognex started out and for up until about 02/2017, everything we did was based around very precise machine code and algorithms that we wrote to describe a problem. And then something happened which is the concept of deep learning really got traction. It’d been around a long time but it really started to get traction and instead of writing precise math, you created a model and you trained the model.

Right? We saw that trend quite early. The the founders of the company who came from MIT, they’d seen many false storms around deep learning where the technology thought, you know, we thought it would change the world and it didn’t. But suddenly here it was and it was really working and we began applying it to machine vision. And what that has meant is there are many more things that it can do.

And what it specifically can do are much more human like tasks, things that we’re really good at looking at looking at an area and seeing imperfections that aren’t necessarily precisely described. So that’s one change that’s gone on. The other thing is, you know, like all technology companies, the technology has become smaller, more powerful, easier to use, less expensive and it’s meant it’s gone from being used only by the most sophisticated industries. I’m thinking of semiconductor and automotive. Think where there really aren’t a lot of people in general.

And it’s becoming more available to lots and lots of customers. And particularly, that would apply to more recently areas like packaging companies that before when we’d gone with our technology to to look at that bottle cap running on a line, it was too expensive and too difficult for them to apply. But as we’ve taken this new AI technology and we’ve made it run much more simply, less code intensively at the edge on a processor, on a smart camera, it can be sold and applied and and be working in a matter of days.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: Yeah. So when I first started covering you guys, logistics wasn’t a market that we talked about at all. Yeah. And now it’s one of your largest end markets. How do we think about the potential for something like that popping up again?

Like another huge market kind of coming out of nascent stage to something very developed. Like what are some of the potential possibilities for something like that?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yeah. I think to answer that question, I’d be thinking about where do you see a lot of people? Right. Right? You know, where do you see a lot of people in manufacturing doing things that probably in the long run computers and technology will do better?

One area we see it in is human visual inspection. So we estimate there are about 35,000,000 people in the world who go to work every day. All they’re doing is really looking at something and saying, is it good or bad? If you go to a big contract manufacturer in China, you see, you know, holes and holes of thousands of people looking at things like connectors and saying and vision technology is getting to the point where it can cost effectively replace those types of applications. And that will play out broadly.

But it also might mean we’ll get into markets that we haven’t served before. The founder of our business, Doctor. Bob Schulman, used to like to say, we don’t inspect anything made by God. It’s like natural variations are quite hard for machine vision to work on. But with AI, you can train it and you can show it hundred coffee beans and say these are good and these are bad.

And you can set it up and running and you can replace potentially people who are doing that kind of work. So that’s one area. I think another area where you see a lot of activity today, which I think in the years to come, I don’t think in the next year but I think in multiple years to come will be replaced and that’s more around picking of things that robots will start to do more and more. The concept of picking is very difficult. It’s it’s a difficult concept.

It it’s it’s all all involves all sorts of mechatronics and vision but it’s gonna get there at some point and I think we’ll see a lot of replacement of those areas too. And maybe the final area I would say is I think I’m I’m waiting for the next consumer electronics big, big thing to happen. Right? So certainly when we saw the smartphone take off, when we saw facial recognition and OLED screens, it happened. It’s been a little while.

So I’m looking forward to that happening because I think when that does, when we get mass produced products in high volume, I think the world’s going to look to Cognex to help manufacture those. And I did read the story you did probably to OpenAI and Johnny Ive and their quest to develop something that’s perhaps a success of the smartphone. So again, I think these are all areas of interest.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: So over the last like two years, you’ve started to pursue this emerging customer initiative. Why make the move when you did? What’s gone right? What hasn’t? And maybe just describe that whole kind of strategy

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yeah. So so Cognex got into deep deep learning technology around 02/2017 and we hired this amazing engineering we bought this amazing engineering team in in Switzerland who made these very powerful models and they were great but really only the most sophisticated customers could use them. Then that team developed something called edge learning and what it is it pre trained these very powerful models to use much less code and have them work on a small piece of hardware that we can manufacture and sell very profitably for a few thousand dollars and it bought a lot of that capability to customers who we couldn’t serve profitably before. So with that, we said, great, but we need a sales channel to sell out. We need we need a sales force to go and reach a lot of customers.

We think of our market like a pyramid. Right? And we kind of have very strong share on the top of the pyramid, the world’s most sophisticated companies. But below them are, we estimate, perhaps 300,000 customers who can benefit from our technology and so we created a sales force to go out and do that. And we hired out of college young salespeople who we then trained and put in the field and in the first year, we spent about $30,000,000 hiring, training, and deploying them.

They made the first class 80,000 sales calls. They won 3,000 new customers. They they sold at, you know, high high gross margins. They referred a lot of business to the rest of our salespeople and now we’ve we’re on our second year where the second class is entering the field. I should say that class last year was selling by the end of the year about a million dollars a week.

It’s kind of where they were. So we’re on a pace to keep going with that and drive and meet those new customers and sell to them. You asked what didn’t go well, I think because we were probably a little over indexed on automotive in terms of where we sent them to sell. We were very comfortable in those markets. We the automotive industry was not good.

And I think we’re realizing that there are other markets such as those in packaging that I think are very good for customers, these salespeople to call on and sell more broadly.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: And what does that market look like? Is it people who aren’t using anything? Is it, you know, Keyence is a major presence in that area?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yeah. Yeah. Well, went out on, you know, I go out on sales calls, you know, with with these guys, poor them. And so so I, you know, I just try to observe. But, you know, a lot of, you know, companies I’ve been to have been like in food and beverage type applications, right?

And there’s nothing there today and they have a problem. Something’s not working in their production. They’re having quality issues. Boxes aren’t being closed correctly or they’re in the wrong orientation or the things that could be simply identified quickly by a salesperson who can put in a solution to make it work. And they’re pretty small companies, so with without something.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: So it it sounds and we’ll talk more about this at Investor Day coming up. But if m and a becomes more a part of the the of the strategy on a more consistent basis, what are some logical kind of adjacencies that you think could make sense?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: You you mentioned the magic word, was Investor Day. Right? So June I wanna take all the time come come to Cognex where you can really see our technology, meet meet Cognoids, understand kind of our business more, see use cases, and hear from our new CEO who’s taking over from me at the June about his vision for the business. So your question is about where can we grow in terms of adjacencies? I think I’d start by saying like I don’t think we need to move into adjacencies to grow strongly.

I think in our own served market there are a lot of good targets. There are a lot of companies that I think good acquisition targets for us. Or they’re almost like near adjacencies like we did with optics where we bought the company Maritex a couple of years ago, which you can’t do machine vision without a lens. They were the premier lens supplier into our industry and they bought a lot of penetration in Japan in semiconductor that we like. So I think those represent the real sweet spot.

But then there are adjacencies which are sort of markets that we’ve dipped our toe into where we can see going deeper. I’m thinking particularly more in the sensor space. But I don’t don’t expect us to make some kind of, you know, completely new thematic adjacency. We won’t be getting into the eye care business.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: Fair enough. So to your point, you you announced your retirement after a long time at Cognex. What do you think of the two or three most important things that your successor needs to get right?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Right. Yes. So so Matt Moschner is taking over for me. I’ve been the CEO for fourteen years and with Cognex for seventeen years. I think the things that he is focused on, you’ll hear him talk a lot about at at investor day.

One is leading in the application of AI technology to factory automation and machine vision. That’s something we’re we’re on a mission for. We we love what we’re doing. The world recognizes us and we have to keep going with that core competency. So that would be The second thing is really around customer experience.

Right? You know, we our number one company value is customer first. Right? And we’ve invested a lot certainly in systems and processes to do that more effectively. When you’re looking after a customer and you have 10, it’s different than when you have 50,000, right?

And we need to make sure that we’re going making progress where every customer feels very special about the way we treat them and and the satisfaction that they have with us. And the third would be growing our number Like, we’ve really got to turn the crank on that. We can’t just be the supplier to the elite, most sophisticated manufacturers who love us, by the way, and love our engineers and love working with us. We need to broaden that number down into the base of the pyramid and and do that.

So those are the three things I

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: would say. So

Rob, CEO, Cognex: And if I had to have a fourth, it would be culture.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: Yeah. Right? So I’m I don’t know him personally. I’m excited to meet him in a in a few weeks. What gives you the confidence that he’s the right person to take over and why was now the time to make that trend?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Well, hired him eight years ago and he was reporting to me for a while over those eight years and it’s it’s been a we we take succession planning very seriously at the board level at Cognex. So we’ve been really we’ve had a number of really excellent candidates that we brought along over that time period. And Matt has risen to the top. But he’s been field tested. He led our logistics strategy back in, I think it was, 2018 when we really started to inflect into some major growth.

He managed our response to the chip shortages and a fire that we had at our major contract manufacturer. He led our entire engineering organization and most recently he’s led the logistics business back to growth. So I think his credentials are awesome. I think Cognoids see that. I think they’re looking, you know, forward to his energy and and drive.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: Great. Maybe I’ll pause for a second and see if anyone in the audience has anything before we move on. Seems like I was right in the beginning.

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Is that always how it goes down? Like, I I travel the world and in some some markets, there’s a hundred questions like India, everyone would have a question. And then in other markets, Japan, everyone looks at their shoes. We’re in Japan today. Yeah.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: So we get asked a lot about the difference between computer vision, smart vision, where one is appropriate, where the other is, and different price points, different applications. How do you see those two markets evolving and where do you think your position long term and what’s your

Rob, CEO, Cognex: moat there? So I think if I’m interpreting your question correctly, you’re saying sort like a generally available vision models like Lama. Correct, very much.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: You know writing your own code on an off the shelf optics.

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Right, right. So we’ve been in this industry you know for forty three years and I would say there’s a dynamic that’s true before and still true today which is what what you have to do in our industry is have a lot of industry know how about applying technology to work at 99.99%. Right? And and a lot goes into that. It’s it is the technology, it’s also the support you have with customers, the global rollout, your experience having seen applications before that they’re doing.

But I think probably the question on everyone’s mind is like are new machine AI models gonna replace what we do? And I think come to investor day because you will really hear I think a very much better than I can have can give you coherent response to that. But the answer is the precision to do that is extremely difficult to do and it requires a lot of domain expertise and our market is not so big that any of those models are being direct developed with it in mind. So we take large models and we benchmark against them like like Lama. Okay?

And and we developed our own transformer model that we launched last year, which way outperforms those models in our own applications. And then we apply that in a way that customers really can use and make sense for their production. And we have the best customers that we’re working with on it. So that’s kind of how it plays out and then then the technology itself, how we then can can pre train it and put it into efficient embedded hardware at the edge is something we do extremely well and then how we sell that really makes a huge difference. So it’s true today and it was true seventeen years ago when I joined that we outperform pretty much everybody in most difficult applications for that industry.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: So like a lot of when we get people more more cautious on the story, lot of it is like how is this not some sort of inherent threat in the future that these models keep getting better and it just it’s in some sort of inevitability that it becomes able to do that to the level that you can. How do you kind of protect against that? Yeah. How you respond

Rob, CEO, Cognex: to that? I think they will get better, right? And and we will get better at how we use them and apply them. I I think of I think of the story of maybe every technology company in Cognex is we’re inventing on the high end. We’re doing difficult things, Right?

And over time, those become easier, easier and they become commoditized and we don’t do them anymore. An example would be reading a paper barcode, a paper printed barcode like you see at the airport. By the way, they don’t do that very well. Right? You see you’re waiting to board but there it is.

So but those things so we don’t really sell into that market anymore. But we’re inventing things, you know, to replace human visual inspection and applications. And there’s a lot of domain knowledge, a lot of IP and patents. We have over a thousand patents in this area that we then manage and we work with the most sophisticated customers as it migrates. And then over time, we sell all the products to customers who are more price driven or whatever and we’re inventing high performance technology at the high end of the curve.

So I see that continuing and I think our ability to understand where the technology is at the cutting edge as applied to our not huge industry is kind of how I see that playing out and supporting customers globally.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: So I think cost leverage at the OpEx line seems to be a pretty big opportunity. I’m just curious, what is your ability to take AI and kind of leverage that to maybe have less human talent needed to program or something like

Rob, CEO, Cognex: that? now we’re talking about something different. That we were talking about how we apply it to our own. Correct. Now we’re talking about how do we apply it to our own engineering.

Correct. Yep. Right? And it it I I think every company is is working on that idea of how do they make their their their company more productive and capable. Exactly.

In our case, we have a lot of software programmers and tools like GitHub Copilot, which really allow a lot of code to be written automatically and is your copilot. Know, a cognix coder is writing the difficult pieces of code with the domain knowledge and the copilot is taking care of a lot of the Yeah. Simpler parts that happen and that could be as much as 30% of the code that’s being written today and it’ll be more. Right? So, you know, you you can code like the best coder and you can have the copilot getting it done.

So we’re either gonna pivot that into fewer engineers or more applications and more technology advancement. A lot of that will depend on how the market is doing. We we wanna grow our OpEx slower than our growth. Sure. And that’s what we see ourselves doing.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: So you mentioned culture in the beginning. It’s it’s it’s definitely gonna be on display in a few weeks. I know it draws people to the firm. But as you move into things like emerging customer, does it require a different type of style? I know that the the established competitor in that specific world has a very, very different culture than yours and you tend to take people from them.

But they’re also very successful in that world. So is there some element of like maybe there is one way of managing to one outcome versus, you know, your historical kind of core?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yeah. I I mean, so so to kind of expand on your question, we have a large sales force. Right? And lately, have recruited a lot more people straight out of college. Right?

And the existing sales force were often industry veterans who had a lot of experience, some of whom we recruited from competitors like the one you’re mentioning. They came to Cognex and I think a lot of them thought like they died and gone to heaven. It was like fabulous company, great culture, better technology, what was not to like, right, when they were being managed more in a a very aggressive culture. So that’s been great and great at retaining them. But then this new profile we have, I think they enjoy a lot about our culture.

We’ve trained them up and made it where you’ll see they’re playing ultimate frisbee with us. They have great sense of camaraderie and a class among them. And they enjoy our culture in a lot of ways. But it is different. It’s less I’d say our philosophy is more we value people’s individual contributions.

And we encourage them to be creative within a certain prescribed things. Like some cultures don’t allow salespeople to go out and make a call on a Friday, for instance. That’s not our culture. We think they should decide on how they manage their schedules and we will manage them more by their performance and the metrics that we see.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: I have no doubt that they like it. Mean, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone go the

Rob, CEO, Cognex: other way. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it’s going well, we have, you know, we implemented Salesforce five years ago. We’ve we’re really on to many iterations of that.

We’re now we’re really able to understand the work that goes on and help them improve it. And I think it’s true that in any company, recent graduates have a higher attrition rate. So certainly that’s that’s something we expected and and are seeing that.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: So you don’t feel like success is not dependent on on some sort of grind at that sort of doesn’t have to be that maniacal.

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Joe, I think all success is dependent on grind. I guess I guess the wrong kind. The question is, are you enjoying it? Yeah, work hard, play hard, move fast. I tell my children, like, you you’re not going to get anywhere unless you really work hard.

It’s like they, you know, it’s percent perspiration, you know, 10% inspiration. But we have a lot of inspiration too, right? And we play art and we have a lot of fun and we move fast. So we do empower people to do stuff, cognoids to do stuff. We even have a we have an award we have called Don’t Do What You’re Told, Do What’s Right, where people innovate.

Recently, we gave it to an engineer who his boss said, don’t try to do that with machine vision. It’s too difficult. He went off. He spent weekends working on it. He came back and he made it work.

So we gave him an award. That’s the kind of thing we do. Really respect at at Cognex and celebrate and that applies no matter what your level is in the company.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: Perfect. Before we wrap, maybe we touch on the end markets a little bit. Where we are? I mean, you have three three large ones. Where where are we in in those relative cycles and how do you how do you what’s your most up to date kind of view?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yes. So I actually even we think of now four markets with packaging. Packaging. The other one, right, which I think would be our third largest market now. Okay.

So I’ll take through the markets. So not one of the big ones, but semiconductor doing very well, our fastest growing market last year. There’s some sort of caution around some of the trade stuff that’s going on, but still I think we’re in a very nice growth position with that market overall. Logistics, our biggest market, grew 20% last year. We see a lot of momentum.

The post COVID tightness in spend and overcapacity is behind us and we’re now seeing a lot of great growth. So that market is going very well. Consumer electronics, we see modest growth this year. And I think we we tend to have visibility around this time of year into the whole industry overall. I think there’s lots of opportunities for growth coming, but at the moment, that’s how we size this year.

And then the market that really continues to be very difficult for us is automotive. So much pain in that industry. We shrank 14% in automotive last year. I think it won’t be that bad. This year, I don’t expect, but it’s still pretty grim, I would say, terms of what those companies are going through.

I I do think there’s only a certain amount of time you can hold your breath and not spend money, right, on automation. So I think that some of that will come back our way. But it’d be interesting to see where is the automotive industry going and how does audit how is automation gonna play into that? Is it EV? Is it hybrid?

Right. What, you know, where what models are gonna work?

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: On logistics specifically, I mean, agree. Everything that we heard before all the tariff stuff started was that, yes, there’s definitely momentum off off of a trough there. Was there any sort of like paralysis in decision making as some of these tariffs got crazy? And have you seen any of that dissipate?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: You’re talking earlier about investment decisions Correct. The world based on huge, huge You

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: in that one too.

Rob, CEO, Cognex: In EV is what you’re

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: talking about. EV battery. Was talking Oh. Logistics because that was a market that I think was absolutely recovering. Yes.

And I was just concerned that maybe that got put on pause briefly as some of these things

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Not that I see. Not not in logistics. No.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: Okay. Yeah. In auto for sure.

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yeah. I I think I think that the markets that have been really impacted by these trade issues are sort of strategically important markets. You know, semiconductor Yeah. Right, have been impacted automotive and EV battery particularly. Yes.

But not logistics. Okay.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: We touched on a bunch, this would be my last one, but you have an investor day coming up, so without spoiling it, what are some of the things that you expect to focus on for everybody?

Rob, CEO, Cognex: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you’ll see our new CEO laying out his strategy, you know, his company, his vision for the company. I think it will be based around the three things I talked about. You know, the AI leadership, experience, and increasing the number of customers.

Think and you’ll see how we’re doing that and you’ll you’ll hear a lot about our technology. We’re a technology company. You’ll hear from our technical leaders. And something I love about good technical leaders is how they can explain something very complicated in a very simple way that we can all understand. So I think you’ll come and you’ll you’ll I think it will answer a lot of the questions you have about disruptive technology, what we do, how it will play out, how we can do more, what the competitive situation is, those types of things.

And I think and I think you’ll hear a lot about you’ll see a lot about our culture as as you mentioned. So please please come and do that. We we do have an event the night before which I hope some of you will. This is a customer panel I think where you can hear about how customers work with us.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: We have twenty five seconds if anyone has something they want to throw out. Otherwise, we’ll wrap up. Great. Here we go. Stuart.

Bring it.

Rob, CEO, Cognex: So so Cognex has some amazing technology for EV battery manufacturing. Right? It’s I’ve I’ve got to know this process very well. It’s a very difficult, you know, capital intensive process where our technology can make a huge difference. So I think if if we can see that market come back, you know, and continue to grow, I think it’s it’s huge for us.

I did say, I think, recently that our expectations for EV were about to do about $50,000,000 more last year than we did. We really saw that market. There’s a huge potential at the start of last year, and it really just didn’t happen. Right? I think I think it sort of has to happen at some point, right, which would cause us to lean back in.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD: Great. I think we got to leave it there but thank you everyone for joining. Thanks, Joe. You very much.

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