For anyone who has attended Fabtech over the past few years, there has been an undeniable presence: dozens of low-cost, seemingly fly-by-night laser manufacturers. Sure, some seem more legitimate than others, but the fact remains – the influx of international machine builders is changing the fiber laser landscape as well as fabricators’ buying habits.
The manufacturing industry isn’t alone when dealing with low-cost disruptors. Consumers are faced with unending product options at tantalizing, hard-to-believe price points in almost every thinkable category. Fast fashion floods social media feeds while cheap, disposable electronics are hard to avoid on e-commerce marketplaces.
Al Bohlen, president of Mazak Optonics Corp., says the phenomenon is due to a fundamental shift in mindset. He uses his adult kids as an example.
“They buy stuff on Amazon all the time,” he says. “They’ll buy a Bluetooth speaker just because they’re having a party. A part of them accepts that it might not even work, but it’s only $22, so why not? They’ve been pre-programmed to lower their expectations, so if it actually works, it’s like they won the lottery.”
Rolling the dice on a cheap laser machine shouldn’t be the same – they cost a tad more than $22 – but business owners are doing it anyway. They accept the fact that there’s going to be minimal service or support and understand if they need spare parts, they might have to find them on Google.
“The largest machine tool builders in the world, which includes Mazak, have hesitated to bring more entry-level products into the market,” Bohlen explains. “Some of that has to do with brand awareness – we don’t want to deteriorate or compromise years of building high-quality machines by offering something that’s less than our standard.”
Reputation retention
Founded in Japan in 1919, Mazak has been in business for 107 years with a U.S. presence for almost 60 years. For its laser division specifically, the company has spent the past 30 years developing and maintaining a robust support infrastructure for the North American market. Risking that long-standing reputation to offer a cheaper machine just wasn’t an option. Bohlen again uses one of his children as an example.
“My son is a welder and owns a small fab shop,” he says. “Recently, he bought a well-known brand’s welder, but one of their least-expensive units. A year later, it broke and the company refused to fix it, saying it would cost more to fix it than to just buy a new one.”
Understandably, that experience really soured his son on the brand. Bohlen says that’s the exact challenge major laser machine OEMs face.
“If we were to purely offer customers cheap machines, we’d have to assume that’s what their experiences would be like, too,” he says. “It would no doubt tarnish the brand.”
As other major OEMs began white-labeling lower cost options, Mazak chose not to. As the years passed, however, and as more Chinese companies flooded the halls of Fabtech and other trade shows, Bohlen candidly admits “we were all losing market share.”
After several rounds of conversation with the Mazak founding family, who remain deeply involved with the company, it was agreed: If a lower cost solution could be developed that didn’t compromise on the company’s core reputation, it could be a win-win for Mazak and potential customers.
The result is the company’s new brand, Optonics, and the first two machines under this new umbrella. The Lz 3015A, available in 6 kW or 12 kW with a 5-ft.-by-10-ft. table, is the perfect example of a core workhorse machine. Designed for everyday job shop production, it offers high-quality processing at a lower price point.
The Lz 6025A is available in 12 kW and 20 kW and comes with a larger 20-ft.-by-8.3-ft. table. By offering the large-format option under the Optonics moniker, Mazak satiates the market’s growing need for larger sheet sizes at an affordable price point. The offering is also a benefit to Mazak customers considering the larger size wasn’t previously available in the company’s lineup.
Non-negotiables
To release the new machines, there were several areas that couldn’t be undermined: First, the machines had to be built on Mazak’s reputation for producing reliable, quality equipment. But perhaps even more importantly, the machines had to deliver on the utmost in safety.
In terms of quality, Bohlen says that while his sales team could sell $100,000 machines around the clock, that price point would require the company to cut corners. If the goal was to offer customers technologies that would surpass the standard Chinese products, the price point would have to be a bit higher.
“One way to think about the Optonics brand is to compare it to the automotive market,” Bohlen says. “Think about Lexus and Toyota. The Lexus GX 550 is a beautiful but expensive SUV whereas the Land Cruiser is similar but at a lower price point. It’s built on a similar chassis, but it doesn’t have all the luxury features of the Lexus.
“The laser machines under the Optonics umbrella will be like the Land Cruiser,” he says. “They won’t have all of the luxury features of the Mazak laser machines, but they’ll still be quality, reliable machines.”
The perfect balance of quality and price point was achievable thanks to Mazak’s already established footprint in China. Its facilities are located just outside of Shanghai. One was established more than 20 years ago to produce machine tools, and the other more than 15 years ago to produce laser cutting equipment – both for the Asian market.
Because China consumes an eye-popping amount of machine tools, 1,000 employees across the two factories build at least 400 machines each month. Producing the Optonics machines, therefore, can be done by leveraging Mazak’s years of experience and manufacturing partnerships in China. Production is accomplished with a very high level of established know-how, both from a cost and capacity standpoint.
Safety and support
As for safety, the sad reality is that many of the companies producing low-cost machinery take dangerous shortcuts to achieve their desired price points. Point blank, they just don’t have the experience, technology or desire that Mazak has when it comes to keeping operators safe.
“It takes a lot more than a simple enclosure around the machine,” Bohlen says. “We incorporate electronics that monitor the use of the machine. Without those electronics, it’s possible to trick the machine to think that the door is closed, which allows the machine to keep running with the door opened. Our machine, however, monitors how much the door is opened and closed. We built logic into this monitoring feature that says, ‘if you aren’t opening and closing the door all day long, something’s wrong.’ In normal operation, you have to open and close the door.
“We also flag errors like someone replacing material but never walking through the light barrier,” he adds. “It’s more expensive to add this technology, but we feel like we have to. Our long history of building lasers has led us to know that customers really do take these shortcuts.”
Other non-negotiables included the need for customers to have access to Mazak’s established service and support infrastructure. That includes Mazak’s North American headquarters infrastructure based in Illinois, which features a training center, applications department and service department, including a $12 million parts inventory where 95 to 98 percent of parts are shipped same day.
“You’re going to pay a bit more for the Optonics brand than another Chinese product, but that’s because you’re also paying for the additional technology, service and support, and our overall North American infrastructure,” Bohlen says. “Mazak has been in the United States for more than 30 years, building up that infrastructure and the service and support technicians and field engineers to support it. You won’t have everything that comes in our higher end models, but you can cut a lot of the materials just the same. Maybe not at the full speeds of the higher end models, but they will still do the job. Some of those features are a ‘nice to have, not a need to have.’”
Pride in ownership
When Bohlen first started his career in the 1980s, laser cutting equipment was barely a thing. When they first emerged, there were only four or five machine builders worth mentioning, and that stayed true for several years.
“Then there were 10 or 15 of us,” he says. “And now, there’s a tremendous number of Chinese competitors in our market that weren’t here 10 years ago. The landscape has changed.
“To participate in that new environment required us to think of the brand first: the quality, the service, the support and all the other things people have come to know us for,” he says. “We have a deep infrastructure of people, experience and service, and you can’t forfeit that. But if you buy a machine that’s incredibly less expensive, something has to give. That’s just reality.”
Bohlen goes on to say how proud he is of the Mazak team to have introduced the new Optonics machines in the best way possible. Although they come in at a higher price point than the other low-cost brands, it’s for good reason.
“While we’re navigating these waters and watching the markets, we’re learning that there are some fundamental, foundational principles that we have to maintain when building a machine: quality control, proven components, safety and support,” he concludes. “And we aren’t compromising on that.”
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