Tale of Two Strategies in Japan: Kitamura and Toshiba.

A small Japanese machining-center builder is expecting a sharp recovery, counting on exposure at IMTS. Kitamura Machinery Co., located in a provincial city of Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, estimates its sales would total some $105-million for the year ending March, up some 50% over a year earlier.

Export-oriented Kitamura predicts that international sales could account for 70% of the total sales. No breakdown by market is available, but the company sees the U.S. as more promising than the European nations. For most of this year the euro currency has remained weak against the Japanese yen, making exports there unprofitable.

Thus a push in Chicago: Kitamura decided to display nine MC machining centers -- eight of its Mycenter brand machines plus a Spark for metallic-mold production. Of the nine, seven have been newly developed, while two are improved versions of existing models. With 200 employees, Kitamura's workforce is relatively modest Yet, the company runs three wholly-owned overseas marketing/sales subsidiaries. In 1982 it started up Kitamura Machinery of U.S.A. in Wheeling, Ill. Kitamura Machinery G.m.b.H. was established in Dusseldorf, Germany, two years later. Kitamura Machinery Sales was founded in Cypress, Calif.; in 1989.

In comparison to Kitamura's nine machines, Tokyo-headquartered Toshiba Machine Co. (Numazu, Japan) prepared four models, including the MPF-214c column type electric discharge diesinker and the NX76 horizontal-spindle machining center for molds. The exhibit was mounted through Toshiba Machine Co. America (Elk Grove Village, Ill.), founded in 1974. This may be symbolic. Toshiba Machine a few months back amended its long-term business strategy in favor of pushing what president Takayuki Inokuma calls "form machines." Specifically these mean, among other products, plastic injection molding machines, die casting units, and extrusion equipment.

As a result, the company's traditional machine-tool line would be reduced to, in his words, "those machines that are necessary for the production of metallic molds as required by the forming operation." Continuing its traditional machine-tool operation would be tantamount to "suicide," Inokuma remarked.

Toshiba Machine, which traces back to the 1875 founding of Shibaura Engineering Works and is 48% owned by electronics giant Toshiba Ltd., had $288-million in machine-tool sales last year. That represented around 30% of total sales, and that percentage has remained fairly constant in recent years, down from around 40% at the beginning of the 1990s.

From Tokyo via Wordservice International.