Steady results from Dalsa

If you look at the year on year figures, Dalsa’s results look dreadful. Revenues are down 25% for the first nine months of 2009, which looks pretty ugly. (Income figures are muddied by last year’s sale of discontinued operations.) But if you want to get an idea of the trend, I suggest comparing the third quarter of ’09 with the second. This shows that business is broadly flat, although if you screw your eyes up tight and hold the paper up to the light you might make out a slight upwards trend.

We all know that companies have been cutting spending and conserving cash, so it’s no surprise that the results are down. What impresses me though is that even though SGA expenses have been cut, R&D spend has been maintained at about its 2008 level. In fact Dalsa are putting close on 20% of revenue into R&D, up from about 16% in 2008, which says to me that they are serious about being around for the future.

What do you think they’re working on? Well on the digital imaging side of the business, I think it’s a safe bet that they’ll be expanding the new BOA smart camera line and I would expect to see a 2Mp version out early in 2010. They’ll almost certainly put Sherlock on the BOA too, setting them head-to-head with Cognex.

2010 should be an interesting year.