JUNE 2--Coreco Inc. (www.coreco.com) has announced its results for the first quarter, ended March 31, 2004. The company reports first-quarter revenues of US$5,321,920, representing growth of 22% over the same period last year and 7% quarter over quarter. The gross margin amounted to 60.7%, which compares with 55.0% one year ago and 61.2% last quarter--in line with management's objective to maintain gross profit at approximately 60% of sales.
As a result of the revenue growth together with the company's higher operating leverage, net earnings increased to US$0.05 per share in the first quarter compared with a net loss of US$0.01 per share in the same period last year. At March 31, 2004, the company held US$3,879,122 in cash and working capital continued to be healthy. Cash flow from operating activities amounted to US$413,490 compared with US$54,435 in the same quarter last year.
All the company's major geographic markets contributed to the higher sales in the quarter, with the USA growing by 34%, followed by Asia at 26% and Europe at 10%. At the end of the first quarter, Asia accounted for 21% of the company's total sales, Europe for 29%, the USA for 48%, and Canada for 2%. At quarter-end, the company's bookings had increased 36% year-over-year with a book-to-bill ratio of more than 1.1. Revenue growth in the quarter was mainly driven by demand from the semiconductor and electronics industries, which increased by 80% over the previous year.
"Our first-quarter results continue the positive momentum that we reported at year-end," commented CEO Keith Reuben. "In addition to strong earnings growth in the quarter, we are pleased by the renewed strength in all our geographic markets, as well as among our core OEM customers in the semiconductor and electronics industries, both of which are big users of machine vision in their manufacturing processes."
The company serves two target markets: original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and end users. The OEM group provides a full range of frame grabbers, embedded products, and accompanying software for integration in high-performance machine-vision applications in the industrial vision, medical imaging, multimedia, and surveillance markets. The Intelligent Products Group provides user-friendly, cost-effective vision appliances for task-specific factory-floor applications, such as gauging, high-precision alignment, inspection, assembly verification, and machine guidance.