NATICK, Mass. July 28, 2008--Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ: CGNX) announced today that China Steel Corporation, a Taiwan-based manufacturer of integrated steel products, has placed an order for seven Cognex SmartView® surface inspection systems. This multi-million dollar sale represents the largest single order that Cognex's Surface Inspection Systems Division (SISD) has ever received. The SmartView systems will be used to perform automated quality inspection at China Steel's manufacturing plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Cognex's surface inspection systems use proprietary, high-performance machine vision hardware and software to automatically detect, visualize, and classify defects on a wide variety of high value-added materials, such as metals, paper, and plastics. China Steel will use the Cognex systems to inspect steel at multiple stages of the manufacturing process, such as during pickling, galvanizing, annealing, and tension leveling, to ensure that the product meets rigorous quality standards.
''Cognex offered a comprehensive solution for each of the very diverse and demanding inspection tasks we evaluated,'' said Mr. Chih-Chung Wu, Assistant General Manager at China Steel's Kaohsiung plant. ''The line scan technology utilized in SmartView offers superior performance, especially in demanding applications, such as in galvanized steel, where we must meet the extremely high quality standards of automotive manufacturers.''
''Increasing demand for steel...particularly in Asia...is fueling new capital spending in steel manufacturing plants worldwide,'' said Dr. Robert J. Shillman, Cognex's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. ''Cognex is in an exceptional position to benefit from that demand due to both the excellent reputation of SmartView and to our company's ability to provide products and services worldwide.''
About Cognex
Cognex Corporation designs, develops, manufactures and markets machine vision sensors and systems, or devices that can "see." Cognex vision sensors are used in factories around the world to automate the manufacture of a wide range of items and to assure their quality. Cognex is the world's leader in the machine vision industry, having shipped more than 400,000 machine vision systems, representing over $2 billion in cumulative revenue, since the company's founding in 1981. In addition to its corporate headquarters in Natick, Massachusetts, Cognex also has regional offices and distributors located throughout North America, Japan, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Visit Cognex on-line at http://www.cognex.com.
