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• Grinding Machines Leader's Comments

Hideo Suzuki　Manager Sales Department, GR Division

What are the main reasons for rapid growth and how about the future goals?

The industry itself has been getting better. The main users of our grinding machines are automobile manufacturers and automobile parts manufacturers. However, we would like to expand our markets for general-purpose machines other than automobile related machines. We would like to aim at the total number in excess of 200 units/year and the annual sales of 20 billion yen.

As for markets, we will continue to concentrate on exclusive-purpose machines for the automobile industry, and we also intend to approach the general-purpose market with coreless grinding machines and double-head grinding machines as our main themes.

As for overseas strategy, our target is the American market. We have established our base in Detroit, we have also put a network of dealers in place, and we will do our very best from now on.

What is the next move toward the general-purpose machine market?

It is our product-ability. The existing lineup of our products consists of such machines that mainly aim at the automobile industry.

In the near future, we will promote the standardization by integrating models and launching new models, and we are also planning to launch compact models in the market.

The first key point for any product is stability. The point is how accuracy can be maintained without any breakage. The next point is how to shorten the machining time. The customers' needs are getting more and more demanding. Greater sophistication and increasingly high speed are the everlasting challenges that we have to deal with in friendly rivalry with the market.

Under such circumstances, innovative methods to grind crankshaft pins have appeared on the market in the past three to four years. Of course, NTC is right in the center of that circle.

Is the specialties about NTC's grinding machines fading away?

The fact that our machines have long been adopted by the automobile industry means that our machines have been used under the extremely tough conditions. It was true that some workshops were told by their customers that they would give jobs only because they felt safe as NTC grinding machines were being used," but today in any market where they put more emphasis on cost reduction, such a story has become a rarity. However, as I think it may be difficult for Chinese manufacturers to enhance their accuracy, the current cost-oriented competition will hopefully calm down.

In addition, as grinding machines are used in the final process, grinding machines will not disappear from the market. For example, they used to finish a workpiece using a grinding machine after cutting to a certain extent in the lathe process, but it now has become possible to finish in the grinding process from the beginning. There is a possibility that intermediate machines may disappear, but the needs for grinding machines will expand from now on. Under such circumstances, we will make every effort to proceed with our approach to "sophistication and high speed" based upon the grinding technologies that NTC has so far accumulated.