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Matties: In terms of performance against hand soldering, is this by far superior? Is the accuracy always 100%?
Kono: Yes, through our vision system accuracy is 100%.
Matties: Are you capturing data that can be fed back to a database?
Kono: They can track the performance of every single board that comes through.
Matties: This unit—or either one of these units—seems good for any industry, right? It's generic. So for somebody who is really concerned about quality throughput, this would be a better solution for them.
Kono: Yes. Most of our customers for the laser are in the automotive industry. They want the same quality and the same condition everywhere. A Japanese company we supply to has, besides their factory in Japan, factories in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, which all produce the same design of automotive electronics. They have to have the same condition in each country. In this case, the personal operators cannot keep the same quality from place to place. This is the key of robotics.
Matties: It's very impressive. How long has this been available and how many units do you have in the market?
Kono: We’ve been working on this for more than 15 years. We started robotics 35 years ago and after 20 years we found that lasers can achieve soldering and we made our own system. We have more than 800 units and we are building all of them in Japan.
Matties: Speaking of Japan, how is Japan’s economy?
Kono: Business has been growing, especially in automotive and consumer electronics. In some industries it is not yet a hit. It is still a bit expensive for the investment.
Matties: Congratulations. How many you would like to have in the market? What's your goal?
Kono: We’d like to have 10 times more. We also offer a less expensive option. Originally, we put the original technology's know-how software inside of our robotics. Now, you can find robotics just about anywhere. So we sell our feeder or controller modules separately so our customers can integrate them into any kind of robotics to build their own robotic soldering system. This is a much lower cost to get a machine similar to ours.
Matties: Can they control it remotely from a computer at their desk or do they have to be nearby?
Kono: The answer is both. Somebody can be sitting at their computer monitoring the process.
Matties: This has been an interesting discussion. Thank you very much.
Kono: Thank you, Barry.
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