Investors

 

Basler has established the goals of using machine vision to a) make industrial production more efficient, b) render medical treatment more effective and cheaper, and b)make our lives safer.

We see many opportunities for using machine vision future applications and we have resolved to translate this potential for Basler into profitable growth in sales.

1. Market leadership by superior consulting effectiveness and innovative easy-to-use procuts & solutions

Basler lays claim to ranking among the top three in the market with its products lines. Our leading consulting effectiveness is one of the two critical success factors for our success. In the past years, we have significantly invested in the expansion and qualtiy of our sales and marketing organization. Our direct sales and our international network of partners are among the largest and most powerful in the entire Vision Technology sector. In this way we can better understand the demands of our customers and orient our solutions accordingly.

Our second key success factor consists of innovative easy-to-use products & solutions. To Basler, innovation means integrating new technologies quickly into our products and offering them to our customers when they are perfected and when they afford a relevant measurable advantage to the customer's application. This advantage may result in increased performance or lower costs. Ease of use is becoming ever more important because our customers will derive more profit from our products when they are more intuitively able to operate them.

2. Growth in sales by focussing on large Vision Technology markets & key accounts

We have learned that our investment in research & development and in sales & marketing will pay off better in large markets than in small market niches. We will therefore continuously increase our share of sales in those markets that reach global sales volumes of more than €50 million and whose average growth rate is above 5% per annum.

Our components business with digital cameras is this kind of "large" Vision Technology market. We are expanding the potential yield of this business for Basler even further and we are aiming at becoming the global market leader in this sector. We will therefore extend our product portfolio and our sales area step by step during the next years.

The video surveillance market is another "large" Vision Technology market. The dynamic growth in this market combined with the current changes of technologies provides a great opportunity to Basler and has prompted us in spring of 2008 to expand our components business by a product line for the video surveillance market.

We are also directing our solutions business to larger markets. During the last 18 months, we have strongly developed our activities in the solar market which we consider one of the future "large" Vision Technology markets. Our activities are aiming at increasing our market share in this future market continuously in the next year.

Since 2007 we have been consistenly orienting ourselves to the demands of key accounts. These customers are manufactures of devices, machines, and equipment and they are at home in a multitude of markets. They buy our components and solutions in major quantities for integrating them into their own products. We are expecting a rising share of sales with key accounts to bring about an even better-balanced mix of sectors in the medium term with less dependence on individual industries and their cyclic demand than at present. In addition, we are anticipating a higher degree of standardization of our own products to increase their quality and to decrease production costs.

3. Growth in earnings due to decreasing costs of production & by concentrating on core competencies

We will continue in the next year to systematically increase our profitability. This will allow us to invest even more in our future and to become even more attractive to investors.

Thereby, we give highest priotrity to continually decreasing production costs for our products and solutions. We have enlarged our purchasing resources for making faster progress in optimizing material costs and cooperation with our suppliers. Our products development is striving to render the production of new products faster and simpler than of previous products. Our production departmens are continuously improving processes and procedures in order to manufacture components and solutions faster and more smoothly than today.

Our product development has critical impact on our profitability. We therefore take great efforts to reduce expense for new designs and to reduce future time to market for new products. In this connection we concentrate to technologies that will set us apart from competitors steadily and critically, this includes the development of software, electronics, and systems. In other technological sectors we increasingly realize development projects together with partner companies.

4. Competitive advantage by continuous learning & improvement

Due to an increasingly intensified competition with companies of low-wage countries it is crucially important for Basler to continuously search for new possibilites for rendering procedures and processes more efficient than our competitors. With this, we will gain a competitive advantage that will be more difficult to copy than any of our products. This will materially contribute to securing the future of our company and all of its locations. Several years ago, we began introducting a "culture of continuous improvement" within Basler and launching our "Q-Advanced" total quality management program. Meanwhile, the principles of "lean production" have been implemented in all of Basler's funtions. All of us are cognizant of the importance of continuous learning, of applying consistently what was learned, and of continuously assuring that the goals set for improvement are indeed reached. We are proud of our success accomplished already and we are more confident than ever of being capable of strengthening our competiveness even further by continuous improvement.