From NC component supply to a final product: entering industrial robots in-house (1974)

Choosing a final product that does not compete with customers

The heart of this decision is that a component maker chose a final product that would not compete with its customers, and raised a new business by recombining the element technologies it already held. The buyers of NC devices are machine-tool makers; to take up the same machine tools itself would turn those customers into enemies. The industrial robot Inaba chose was demand born from automating Fanuc’s own plants, and a domain to which NC and servo technology could be diverted — one that did not put it against its buyers. The constraint of confining the business to its “constitution” worked, ironically, as the very guide for choosing where to enter.

That said, sharing the same element technology promises no success. Robots are strongly subject to the waves of capital investment, in automobiles above all, and Fanuc’s later results rose and fell with that demand. Even so, the choice from 1974 — to re-tie existing technological assets to a new final product and pick a market where it would not compete with customers — produced a second pillar after NC. As what product, and in a form that competes with whom, to bring one’s technology into the world — for any company weighing the move from supplying components to making a final product, this decision offers one template.