From machine tools to electronic-component placement (1981)

The years it was not folded

No record survives of an order being given that turned a maker of single-purpose machines into a maker of electronic-component placement machines. Products were simply added one at a time — the automatic assembly machine in 1971, the inserter in 1978, the placement machine in 1981 — and one of them grew. If there was a decision worth the name, it lies not at the point where a new machine was first built but in the several years the division was not shut down, through the constant complaints about the CP-1 and an internal verdict that this was a sideline. What Otsuya Teruo did was less to order the development than to keep watching over a period that produced no results.

That machine tools were never abandoned says as much about the character of the shift. Long after placement machines had become the main business, FUJI kept its automatic lathes and single-purpose machines and, as President Asai put it, carried the skills forward without interrupting anyone’s employment. But the economics of what was kept never recovered: in the year to March 2026 the machine-tool segment lost $676,530 (¥107m). The decision to move the centre of gravity to placement machines and the losses of the business it would not drop have travelled together ever since.