NOVEMBER 15--Adept Technology (Livermore, CA, USA; www.adept.com) has announced financial results for its first quarter FY2007, ended September 30, 2006. Revenues were $12.7 million, down 13% from the first quarter of FY2006. This decrease reflected lower sales of remanufactured robots to disk-drive manufacturers in the USA and Asia, as well as lower than expected sales of Cobra robots in the United States, as the automotive components market continues to be impacted by downsizing in the domestic automotive industry.
Sales of the company's newer Viper six-axis robots, however, were strong, hitting volume target levels five quarters after introduction. Adept also achieved a major breakthrough in vision-guided robots, delivering 100 vision software units, primarily to high-speed packaging, life science, and food applications. Vision software attachment to motion-control systems doubled to approximately 50% of all systems delivered, versus 25% 12 months ago.
Gross margin was 46.5% of revenue in the first quarter of FY2007, compared with 46.8% of revenue in the same quarter of FY2006. Operating expenses in the first quarter of 2007 were $7.0 million, including the effect of $268,000 in stock compensation expense, compared with $7.1 million in the same quarter of FY2006, which included the effect of $189,000 in stock compensation expense. Adept recorded a loss from operations of $1.1 million in the first quarter of FY2007, compared with an operating loss of $263,000 in the same quarter of the previous year.
"Adept made solid progress against our plan to sell universal robot controllers on multibrand mechanisms with both higher Adept Viper sales and Smart Control service upgrades in the first quarter of 2007," said Robert Bucher, chief executive officer of Adept. "Target vertical market programs gained traction, as well, leveraging Adept's control platform."
