Automation is crucial to future competitiveness Available to Purchase

JAPANESE industry is not short of ambition — an ambition to make goods smaller, lighter, and especially in these days of a very strong yen, cheaper. The large blue‐chip exporting companies all see that automation of assembly processes continues to be crucially important to future manufacturing competitiveness, and their R&D efforts reflect that. In this issue, in addition to the regular industry report from Japan, Assembly Automation takes a look at trends emerging from Japanese industrial laboratories.