Qualla: FANUC

FANUC: Introduction

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Midori, CC BY 3.0. Everything is yellow. The buildings are yellow. The robots are yellow. The hallways, the machinery, the company trucks -- all painted the same distinctive shade. In the village of Oshino at the foot of Mount Fuji, spread across 1.78 million square meters of forest in Yamanashi Prefecture, FANUC operates what analysts call the most automated factories on Earth. Visitors are rare. The press is discouraged. Roughly 2,000 engineers live on campus in company dormitories, and outsiders have compared the atmosphere to a cult. Yet this reclusive company quietly controls 65 percent of the global market for computer numerical control systems, the brains that tell factory machines how to cut, drill, mill, and shape. If you have ever used a product assembled by a robot, there is a strong chance FANUC built that robot.

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Image: Midori | CC BY 3.0

FANUC: Punched Cards to World Domination

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Miyuki Meinaka, Public domain. FANUC stands for Fuji Automatic Numerical Control, and its story begins in 1955 when Fujitsu tapped a young engineer named Seiuemon Inaba to lead a new subsidiary dedicated to numerical control technology. The work was primitive: instructions encoded on punched cards or magnetic ...

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Image: Miyuki Meinaka | Public domain

FANUC: Fewer Parts, More Power

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Biso, CC BY-SA 4.0. FANUC adopted a German engineering slogan as its guiding philosophy: Weniger Teile, meaning fewer parts. Machines with fewer components are cheaper to produce, easier for robots to assemble, more reliable, and less expensive to maintain. The principle drove everything from produc...

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Image: Biso | CC BY-SA 4.0

FANUC: Robots Building Robots

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Robinet, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Oshino campus is where the philosophy reaches its logical extreme. FANUC's 33 production centers in Japan are among the most automated manufacturing facilities in existence, producing up to 6,000 robots per month. Its closest competitor, ABB, produces roughly half that number...

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Image: Dave Robinet | CC BY-SA 3.0

FANUC: The Yellow Kingdom at Fuji's Feet

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Σ64, CC BY 3.0. FANUC is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and sits in both the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX 100 indices, yet it operates with a secrecy more typical of a defense contractor than a publicly traded manufacturer. The Oshino campus, nestled in forests with Mount Fuji visible from every ang...

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Image: Σ64 | CC BY 3.0