FANUC Corporation

By 1980, the license was selling robots between four and five times as fast as it had in its first nine years.

The Era of the Three Cs Fanuc paints its machines, its buildings, and its work jackets yellow.

Its founder was an engineer named Sayuemong Inaba.

Before he built a single robot, he built the part that tells a robot what to do.

In April 1968, that motor won Inaba an invention prize from Japan's Minister of International Trade and Industry.

By 1972, the numerical control division was a profitable business.

In May 1972, Fujitsu spun it off as a separate company, Fujitsu Fanuc.

Inaba became its senior managing director and, in practice, its head.

He's got, I think, over 20 years of experience in robotics.

And he actually worked with ABB, which is, so we use FANUC.

ABB is a competitor to that, but that's the actual robot builders.

So he's been in facilities all over the United States.

And the question now, which I love getting this question, it's my favorite question.

It's like, I have people, I have training money, and I've got to talk to HR, and I need my training budget.

What curriculum would you recommend for me? And what we do is we send them to FANUC, to where my guys got trained.

And I say, I want them to have the same training, because from my military background, if we have a basic training, we have the same terminology, we can communicate with each other really, really well.

And then they're going to say, great, here's a PLC.

Here's a FANUC robot.

Let's go make sure this is a repeatable product every single time too.

So I think there like has to be that like zero to one aspect that really has to happen.

Even here behind us and in all kinds of industries.

Think about all the typical KUKA and FANUC.

I mean, these are big robotic arms that are operating since decades out there.

And then we have our autonomous mobile robots that are maybe not since decades out there, but let's say at least since 10 to 20 years, we have a strong development and we have very well-designed robots that work perfectly.

The company says the tech can ease the workload of human personnel.

Machine tool maker FANUC is showcasing a technology in which AI interacts with humans to generate design concepts for metal surface processing.

The AI then relays specific machining instructions to the equipment.

The manufacturing industry is increasingly embracing AI in an effort to address worker shortages and improve productivity.

But the, you know, the slightly sort of hindsight capital version owned a lot of the stocks that have actually done pretty well over the over over the last over the last 20 years.

So, you know, FANUC was a four bagger.

Caterpillar, and I'll come back to them again, was a was a 20 bagger.

right um but other names like schneider electric etc would have feasibly got into that portfolio but it was an interesting it was an interesting path and and caterpillar's a case in point right um you know this is a stock that's you know for for most of most of existence has sort of traded at you know early double digit forward ebitda it currently trades at 20 sort of you know two standard deviations above the above above above the 20-year mean right for a and this is even ltm ebitda for a classic cyclical business right so what kind of what kind of business do you have um you know paying you know two standard deviations above above the the mean the mean multiple right it could carry on being a great it could be carry on being a great business for the next 10 years but where you underwrite it today is is all that matters and um Yeah.