Tom Zabkiewicz, Executive Vice President, FUJI America

Tom Zabkiewicz, Executive Vice President, FUJI America Corporation

A major contributor of our continued sales success and market share improvement has been our ability to manage these customers' demands for high changeover requirements. This has been accomplished by the levels of automation we are providing to the changeover effort using the automation tools we have introduced to the market.

Our customers will continue to drive for higher throughput, smaller footprint, extremely higher accuracy's and lower cost of ownership. Fortunately these market requirements exactly parallel Fuji's current technologies as well as our future technology roadmap. Our continued partnership with the leading customers and technology suppliers around the world, will keep us in a position to meet  today's market demands, and continue to stay ahead of the curve for tomorrows high accuracy and high volume requirements in both the SMT, and Semiconductor markets.

The technologies which FUJI is continuing to bring to the markets are setting precedence's never seen before. Our new developments in not only machine technologies but in other areas of the customers' operations are changing the way the customer runs their SMT placement process. This coupled with Fuji's extremely high reliability assists in continuing Fuji's legacy of a proven solution. This is very evident by new orders, customer feedback, and trade show interest we've experienced to date. These technology developments will continue on an even larger scale into the coming year.

For the coming year, a few things come to mind. We expect a continuation of year end projects from 2013 to carry over into the first quarter of the New Year, along with customers' new requirements to further advance in Q2. Forecasts from our customers are showing optimism throughout 2014. A renewed effort on the part of several of our customers to bring manufacturing back to the US and Mexico from off shore only solidifies this optimism. Our concentration on the Global customer requirement will continue to assist our information flow between customers in all markets and our development teams, strengthening the supplier customer partnership. In addition, Fuji's generational transition taking place all around the world assists us in understanding the ever changing customer ideas and philosophies as well.

Lastly moving onto 2014, we see further benefits during the market recovery process as our previous platforms of equipment as well as those of our competitors are forced into obsolesce with changing technologies and requirements needed by the customer. This has already led to the addition of several new employees within the Americas in 2013, and a streamlining of our current staff.