Machine tool builder

Regarding nationality of corporations, it becomes progressively more meaningless as one travels down the timeline leading up to the present day, when most machine tool builders are (or are subsidiaries of) multinational corporations or conglomerates. With these companies it is enough to say "multinational corporation based in country X", "multinational corporation founded in country X", etc. Subcategories such as "American machine tool builders" or "Japanese machine tool builders" would be senseless because, for example, companies like Hardinge and Yamazaki-Mazak today have significant operations in many countries.

Since many decades ago, the concept of "machine tool builder" implies a company that builds machine tools for sale to other companies, who then use them to manufacture subsequent products. Macroeconomically, machine tools are only means to ends (with the ends being the manufactured products); they are not the ends themselves. Thus it is in the nature of machine tools that there is a spectrum of relationships between their builders, their users, and the end users of the products that they make. There is always natural potential for the machine tool users to be the same people as the builders, or to be different people who occupy a "middle man" position. Markets often have some proclivity for circumventing such a position, although the proclivity is often not absolute. Every variant on the spectrum of relationships has found some instances of empirical embodiment; and over the centuries, trends can be seen for which variants predominated in each era.

From the nineteenth-century founding fathers, such as Henry Maudslay, Joseph Whitworth, and others, through the earliest corporate builders such as Brown & Sharpe and the original Pratt & Whitney, we find examples of product manufacturers who started building machine tools to suit their own inhouse needs, and eventually found that machine tools had become product lines in their own right. (In cases such as B&S and P&W, they became the main or sole product lines.) Colt and Ford are good examples of product manufacturers that made significant advances in machine tool building while serving their own inhouse needs, but never became "machine tool builders" in the sense of having machine tools become the products that they sold. National-Acme was an example of a manufacturer and a machine tool builder merging into one company and selling both the machines and the products that they made (screw machines and fasteners). Hyundai and Mitsubishi are chaebol and keiretsu conglomerates (respectively), and their interests cover from ore mine to end user (in actuality if not always nominally).

Today, machine tool builders tend not to be in the business of using the machine tools to manufacture the subsequent products (although exceptions, including chaebol and keiretsu, do exist); and product manufacturers tend not to be in the business of building machine tools. In fact, machine tool builders even often are not in the business of building the machine tool control system that animates the machine; and makers of controls tend not to be in the machine building business. Each segment tends to find that crossing into other segments involves becoming a conglomerate of dissimilar businesses, which is an execution headache that they don't need as long as focusing on a narrower field is often more profitable in net effect anyway. This trend can be compared to the trend in which companies choose not to compete against their own distributors. Thus a software company may have an online store, but that store does not undercut the distributors' stores on price.

Bibliography

• Rolt, L. T. C. (1965), A Short History of Machine Tools, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press, OCLC 250074. Co-edition published as Rolt, L. T. C. (1965), Tools for the Job: a Short History of Machine Tools, London: B. T. Batsford, LCCN 65080822.
• Rose, William (1990), Cleveland: the making of a city, Kent State University Press, ISBN 9780873384285