Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Camera sales going well


German camera-maker Basler published their third quarter results today, the 6th, and they look surprisingly good. Well they surprised me. Previous quarters haven’t look too rosy, and with all the talk of a downturn in Europe, plus comments from Cognex to the effect that Q3 is never great, I was expecting a dip in both revenues and income.
To my surprise, I was wrong. (Well it had to happen sometime I suppose.) Comparing the first nine months of 2012 with the same period in ’11, things don’t look so great. Revenue was up just 1% while income (profit, to my British readers,) was down 15% to €14m. But compare Q3 and you see a very different picture with both revenue and income up 26% to €16.6m and €2.4m respectively.
What are we to make of this, dear reader?
Well there are some new products – the runner, pilot and ace all debuted relatively recently – but also, Basler has a strong and growing presence in the traffic marketplace. Basler then, seem to be building momentum, and I think this tells us that machine vision continues to be a technology whose benefits outweigh costs. Thus, even when belts need to be tightened, advanced cameras are still in demand.
Good news for all of us I think.

1 comment:

Laith said...

It certainly is ! Although many people have had their fingers burnt by the early days of vision systems, its turned around in the last few years.