FANUC

FANUC (ˈfænək or ˈfænʊk; often styled Fanuc) is a Japanese group of companies that provide automation products and services such as robotics and computer numerical control wireless systems. These companies are principally FANUC Corporation of Japan, Fanuc America Corporation of Rochester Hills, Michigan, USA, and FANUC Europe Corporation S.A. of Luxembourg. FANUC is the largest maker of industrial robots in the world. FANUC had its beginnings as part of Fujitsu developing early numerical control (NC) and servo systems. FANUC is acronym for Fuji Automatic NUmerical Control. FANUC is organized into 3 business units: FA (Factory Automation), ROBOT, and ROBOMACHINE. These three units are unified with SERVICE as "one FANUC". Service is an integral part of FANUC and the company famously supports products for as long as customers use them. In 1955, Fujitsu Ltd. approached Seiuemon Inaba (:ja:稲葉清右衛門), who was then a young engineer, to lead a new subsidiary purposed to make the field of numerical control. This nascent form of automation involved sending instructions encoded into punched cards or magnetic tape to motors that controlled the movement of tools, effectively creating programmable versions of the lathes, presses, and milling machines. Within three years after spending heavily in R&D, he and his team of 500 employees shipped Fujitsu's first numerical-control machine to Makino Milling Machine Co. In 1972, the Computing Control Division became independent and FANUC Ltd. was established. The next phase of expansion would be computer numerical control, which relied on G-code,a standard programming language. At the time, the 10 largest CNC companies in the world were based in the U.S., however by 1982, FANUC had captured half of the world CNC market. FANUC is listed on the first section of Tokyo Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the TOPIX 100 and Nikkei 225 stock market indices. It is headquartered in Yamanashi Prefecture. In 1982, FANUC entered into a joint venture with General Motors Corporation (GM), called GMFanuc Robotics Corporation, to produce and market robots in the United States.