Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ:CGNX) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 4, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Nathan McCurren - Head, Investor Relations

Rob Willett - President and Chief Executive Officer

Paul Todgham - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Joe Giordano - TD Cowen

Guy Hardwick - Credit Suisse

Tommy Moll - Stephens Inc

Jacob Levinson - Melius Research

Josh Pokrzywinski - Morgan Stanley

Chris Grenga - Needham & Company

Rob Mason - Baird

Jairam Nathan - Daiwa Capital Markets

Keith Housum - Northcoast Research

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the Cognex First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Nathan McCurren, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Nathan McCurren

Thank you, Shmouli. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. With me on today’s call are Rob Willett, Cognex’s President and CEO and Paul Todgham, our CFO. Our results were released earlier today. The press release and quarterly report on Form 10-Q are available on the Investor Relations section of our website.

Both the press release and our call today will reference non-GAAP measures. You can see a reconciliation of certain items from GAAP to non-GAAP in Exhibit 2 of the press release. Any forward-looking statements we made in the press release or any that we may make during this call are based upon information that we believe to be true as of today. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to the risks and uncertainties that are described in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and on our Form 10-Q filed this morning for Q1.

With that, I’ll turn the call over to Rob.

Rob Willett

Thanks, Nathan. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us. As anticipated, we had a challenging first quarter of 2023. Revenue from our largest e-commerce customers remained low, and we continue to see cautious investment by customers across many of our end markets. More projects in our sales funnel are being delayed by spending cuts and additional levels of executive approval at our customers amid concerns about near-term demand. You can see this in macro-leading indicators that remain muted.

Since our last call, new orders and manufacturing PMI have decreased slightly in our largest regions, partially offset by an improvement in China compared to the January lows. We’ve seen slow periods like this before, and we’ve come out of them delivering meaningful growth. Our business is shorter cycle and not as backlog driven, as many of our peers, so it tends to inflect more quickly.