INDUSTRY INSIGHT
Riding the wave of change
We speak to Basler’s Hardy Mehl on industry consolidation, embedded vision, and the firm’s shift to a full component range supplier
B
asler outperformed the general upswing in orders and revenue
the VDMA reported from companies in Germany for the first three months of the year. It saw bookings up 27 per cent and billings up 25 per cent in Q1, thanks, in a large part, to business conducted in Asia. Basler is known in the
machine vision sector primarily as a camera supplier, but around 20 per cent of its revenue now comes from other components – lenses, cables, frame grabbers. Tis is a subtle shift in business model. Te company is still working with
similar customers, OEMs and machine builders using vision technology, but is expanding from a single component – the camera, which has been its priority over the last 20 years – to become a multi-component, full range provider. Hardy Mehl, chief financial officer at Basler, told Imaging and Machine Vision Europe that the reasons for this change are twofold. Firstly, it expands the market Basler is able to address; there’s a certain ceiling in market share for cameras alone. Te other motivation is that it gives the firm more differentiation because it is
14 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE VISION YEARBOOK 2021/22
no longer reliant on a single component. ‘Te market is changing; the industry is starting to consolidate,’ Mehl said. He added that because of digitalisation and manufacturer consolidation, there are also changes in the go-to-market route, with distributors being acquired by manufacturers or by private equity firms – Stemmer Imaging was bought by the AL-KO Group in 2017 for example, and Basler itself took over its distribution partner in China, Beijing Sanbao Xingye Image Tech, in 2018. Te consolidation in vision
distributors is changing the roles different companies play in the market, Mehl noted. ‘Tis creates a lot of realignment in the industry; we want to shape this realignment,’ he said, adding: ‘Tere will be changes happening and we have a good opportunity to be one of the driving forces.’ Along with the firm’s own brand of lenses, Basler stocks
lenses from major suppliers including Edmund Optics, Fujinon and Kowa. Its cabling options cover the main data transfer standards, while its frame grabber technology comes from its acquisition of Silicon Software in 2018. Mehl said that Basler brings these different vision components together through its Pylon SDK, where engineers can synchronise the camera with lighting or frame grabbers. ‘It doesn’t feel like different products... as an engineer it feels like one product; different components, but one product,’ he explained. Te value for the customer is a much faster time- to-market and lower R&D costs during the design phase of a machine or device. Te other side to Basler’s
business is its embedded vision offerings, into which Mehl said the company has invested heavily from an R&D standpoint. At the moment, the revenue from embedded is still relatively small, less than five
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