“An outstanding quarter for Cognex”

Or so says Dr. Shillman, Chairman and CEO of the machine vision company, and who am I to argue?

We already knew the results were going to be good, because back on September 27th they put out a revised earning estimate, but I don’t think anyone realized just how much the profit was going to jump. To get the Wall Street view on the numbers, take a look at this post on Tech Trader Daily.

But here’s my question: now that Cognex is back to its money-machine ways, just what are they going to do with all that cash? Can they really find nothing better than keeping it in the bank? Why not bump up the R&D spend? 12% of revenue isn’t peanuts, but bumping it up would be an investment in the future. And if Cognex aren’t sure what the machine vision future looks like, well they have pockets deep enough to shape it to whatever they want.