Behind the scenes of the integration business

Most machine vision integrators are small, privately-held businesses. That means they don’t need to publish their financial results and we don’t get to see how they’re doing.

ISRA is different though. They are one of the biggest players in the vision integration industry and their results are published.

Those for the nine month up to June 30^th, 2013 just came out. Here’s a link to the press release, or you can make do with my summation.

Things are going well. Revenues are up 8% over the same period last year, and by my reckoning they should break the €100 million barrier for the full year.

A couple of interesting points:

• Much of the growth is coming from Asia. That’s consistent with what the likes of Cognex and AVT are seeing.
• R&D spend is around 13% of revenue. That’s higher than I’ve seen from other vision companies, and it may explain (a) why they’re doing well, and (b) why they are able to make such a push in 3D.

Conclusions? Run a tight ship, invest in R&D, and most importantly, deliver solutions that work, and you can make money in integration.