by Gary Mintchell | Feb 24, 2026 | Business, News
I have been wondering how long Mitsubishi Electric Automation could continue on its own. Even given a couple of recent acquisitions (Iconics and Nozomi, for example), it follows other international control companies who followed customers establishing manufacturing in the US but were unable to displace Rockwell Automation as the dominant automation supplier here.
- Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Inc. (MEAU) will transfer to Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc. (MEUS) as MEUS’s Industrial Automation Division to strengthen customer support and enable future innovation and growth
- Mitsubishi Electric Automotive America, Inc.’s (MEAA) production facility in Mason, Ohio, will be transitioned to MEUS to support innovative production and manufacturing for Mitsubishi Electric US and Mitsubishi Electric Automotive America, Inc.
Experience and perspective comprise the curses of having been around for a few decades. I have seen all this corporate speak about efficiencies and the like before. They just point to the need to bring disparate components of the corporation together that can no longer exist on their own. The acronyms get a bit complicated, but here is the news.
CYPRESS, CALIF. – February 5, 2026 – Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc. (MEUS) today announced the structural reorganization of its United States-based businesses. Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Inc. (MEAU), will transfer to MEUS operations and Mitsubishi Electric Automotive America, Inc. (MEAA) will transfer certain operations and transition its Mason facility to MEUS. Thiswill collectively be known as Mason Division (MEUS MSN).
MEAU will transfer all operations to MEUS and be known as Industrial Automation Division (MEUS IAD), joining existing MEUS divisions Elevators & Escalators Division (MEUS EED), Semiconductor & Device Division (MEUS SDD), International Purchasing Division (MEUS IPD), Heating and Air Conditioning Division (MEUS HAD), Defense & Space Systems Department (MEUS DSS) and Americas Corporate Office (MEUS ACO) services.
Finally, MEUS, MEAA and MEAU shared services will integrate under MEUS ACO. This strategic move will streamline North American operations, enhance collaboration across the organization and make way for long term growth and innovation. The newly combined MEUS organization will be led by Mike Corbo, President & CEO MEUS and Chief Representative, Americas region.
Strategic goals of this reorganization include:
- Innovation and Growth – Moving MEAU into MEUS to better serve its markets and customers by integrating processes, leveraging its data, and focusing on innovative, holistic solutions that cross divisions. The organization will explore new business models that combine hardware, software, and service solutions to better serve evolving market demands.
- Talent and Culture – Unifying systems, policies and procedures will enhance corporate culture and cross-department integration, offering more opportunities for employees. A more unified brand will support recruitment and engagement.
- Increase Efficiency – Unifying shared services and governance will streamline process and improve efficiency.
“Bringing MEAU under the MEUS organization as the new MEUS IAD is an exciting step toward the future, supporting the overall Mitsubishi Electric goals and vision,” said Mike Corbo, MEUS President and CEO. “Our expanded capabilities will bring us closer to customers, partners and innovative product and service offerings,” he continued. The impact for customers will include more streamlined offerings, simplified access to a broader range of complementary solutions, and a consistently high-quality customer experience.
In alignment with this reorganization, MEAA’s facility in Mason, Ohio will be brought under MEUS ownership. It will continue to host production, repair, distribution and innovation activities in support of MEAA and MEUS divisions, with additional support and innovation from the combined business units. MEAU manufacturing, repair, and warehouse operations servicing the factory automation industry located in Vernon Hills, Illinois, will relocate to MEUS Mason. Additionally, certain MEAA roles will transition to MEUS to strengthen operations and innovation across businesses.
Location moves and restructuring will begin in February 2026.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 20, 2026 | Business, Commentary, Leadership
I was intrigued by an item in News Items by John Ellis quoting the Wall Street Journal regarding the continued slide in manufacturing employment in the US and the prolonged slide in manufacturing activity. The first Trump administration elicited promises of moving manufacturing to the US with the building of plants. Little of that actually happened. The Biden administration invested a few billion, but what has that brought. The second Trump administration thought that tariffs would provide the protection from competition to jump start manufacturing.
I pose the idea that it takes more than investment. And protection from competition really just allows local companies leeway to raise prices. What it really takes is better, bolder, visionary leadership to search out customer needs, design products they will buy, and then produce the products.
It takes more than waving a few dollars at the problem.
This podcast is sponsored by Inductive Automation.
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by Gary Mintchell | Feb 6, 2026 | Commentary
I’ve been a fan of Om Malik’s writing for decades. There was Red Herring magazine and his GigaOm website. He’s tapped into the tech scene, thoughtful, and insightful.
As you peruse the news, do you get a feeling that it’s just announcement after announcement, video scene after video scene?
You don’t have time to breathe, let alone think, between the decreasing intervals between news cycles.
Check out Om’s Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why.
Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.
People once told me they labeled news sources as politically liberal or conservative. I told them they were missing the point. It was really something like sensational (to capture and hold your attention) or very sensational.
The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as 2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “How Internet Content Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “Amplification and the Changing Role of Media.”
I empathize and followed a similar path.
For the past decade and a half, the whole information ecosystem has become much larger, faster and noiser. It is hardly surprising that nothing works. And we feel a collective sense of overwhelming disappointment.
So, why does nothing work?
Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.
What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.
With so much coming at us all the time, it is difficult to give any single story or news event much weight. More content means already fragmented attention fractures even further.
What’s the new meme?
Velocity has taken over.
Remember the good old days of Facebook and Twitter before the rise of algorithms?
Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is considered “good.” A piece that hesitates disappears. There are almost no second chances online because the stream does not look back. People are not failing the platforms. People are behaving exactly as the platforms reward. We might think we are better, but we have the same rat-reward brain.
We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic. The networks of the past were slower and at a scale that was adaptable. I wrote about this years ago, and nothing since has disproved it. So when the author of “beliefs outrun facts” says nothing works, now you know why.
For example, YouTube.
Let’s use YouTube technology reviews as a case study, because they are universally understandable. Take the launch of a new phone: when the embargo lifts, dozens of polished video reviews appear on YouTube. They run about 20 minutes, share similar thumbnails, and use the same mood lighting. The reviewers had access to the phones before everyone else, so they had time to prepare their reviews.
In the old days, before the current phase of content abundance, folks like Walt Mossberg, Ed Baig, David Pogue, and Steven Levy were often the first to get Apple products for review. Sure, these folks had big platforms, but that head start gave them a lot of clout, which meant many non-Apple companies offered them early access to their products. I never felt cheated or misled by their reviews, though I did notice what they omitted after using the product for a few months.
These days, things are markedly different. For YouTubers, access is the currency of survival. Access, of course, means suggested talking points. Again, nothing new. What’s different is that every reviewer knows that if they paint outside the lines, they’ll lose access. If you don’t have the review out when the embargo lifts, it doesn’t matter if you have a better review; no one is going to notice.
The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The “review” at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.
I’m not sure to what extent this has invaded the manufacturing technology space—but I have met a few who are trying. As for me, I’m a thinker and prefer waiting and evaluating. If you don’t like that, it is OK. I am what I am.
Om concludes:
The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months, and no one will read it. It’s the investigation that requires patience. It’s the work of understanding before passing judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. In a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.
I like signal rather than noise. Read his entire essay. It’s worth it.
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by Gary Mintchell | Feb 4, 2026 | Generative AI, News, Process Control, Security, Software
This news came last week. Just as I was contemplating the business model of cybersecurity firms following another acquisition, this news of a new company launch with a unique take on security. This company will be interesting to watch. The news comes from Amsterdam concerning the launch of a company called Indurex. Naturally they have AI in their product offering and manage to work in an older term—cyber-physical systems.
The quick take: An AI-powered, human-in-the-loop platform that brings together process safety and cybersecurity, turning complex signals into trusted decisions for resilient critical infrastructure.
Indurex, a pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) security company, announced on January 27 its official launch to help protect critical infrastructure, smart manufacturing, and connected industrial operations. The company’s mission is to deliver robust, adaptive security solutions that safeguard both the physical and digital worlds as they increasingly converge.
Founded by a team of seasoned experts in operational technology (OT), cybersecurity, and process safety systems, Indurex enters the market at a decisive time. Operators across energy, utilities, and manufacturing sectors face mounting challenges from IT-OT convergence, cyber sabotage, and cascading system failures — putting both process safety and cybersecurity integrity under increasing pressure and exposing essential assets to unprecedented risk. Traditional tools, designed for isolated IT networks or legacy control systems, can no longer assure the level of operational, safety, and cyber integrity required in today’s highly connected industrial environments.
Industrial organisations continue to face a critical gap between process safety and cybersecurity, which are managed in disconnected silos. Existing tools generate high volumes of alerts without sufficient industrial or engineering context, leading to alert fatigue and a limited ability to assess real operational and safety impact. At the same time, a new class of AI-enabled and cyber-physical threats is emerging — capable of exploiting process behaviour, safety dependencies, and human workflows. Detecting and stopping these threats requires AI-native technologies designed for industrial systems, combined with human-in-the-loop intelligence to ensure explainability, trust, and effective decision-making.
Indurex bridges this gap with an AI-native, interoperable platform that unifies engineering context and cybersecurity intelligence — an approach the company defines as Engineering Cyber Intelligence.
This delivers measurable returns across three dimensions:
- Operational Excellence & Safety Integrity: Fewer trips and faster recovery through unified situational awareness and continuous assurance of Safety Integrity Functions (SIF)
- Cyber Resilience: Contextualized detection and response across digital and physical domains, aligned with operational and safety impact
- Cost & Compliance: Automated reporting and defensible evidence of risk, control maturity, and safety integrity across critical systems
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by Gary Mintchell | Feb 3, 2026 | Business, Commentary, News
Have you who live in the US noticed how the European and Asian automation and control companies have reduced their footprint in America? Not only that, have you noted how (except for Rockwell Automation) the US-based companies increasingly held their conferences overseas?
Long before Trump, a few politicians recognized American manufacturing’s demise.
Reflecting on my experiences in manufacturing and then writing about it, I long ago noted the “Walmart effect”. That company changed advertising decades ago from “Made in America” to “Lowest Prices Always.” Forcing their suppliers to reduce their price every year forced them to drive all costs both material and labor to the lowest possible. And not only Walmart.
Checking today’s News Items by John Ellis, I spotted this item he cites from the Wall Street Journal.
The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended. Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles disappear since 2023. An index of factory activity tracked by the Institute for Supply Management shrunk in 26 straight months through December, but showed a January uptick in new orders and production that surprised analysts. The Census Bureau estimates that manufacturing construction spending, which surged with Biden-era funding for chips and renewable energy, fell in each of Trump’s first nine months in office. (Source: wsj.com)
Investment is good. However, it doesn’t come first. What comes first are entrepreneurs—either independent or in a corporation—who see a customer need to solve. They develop a product. Then they need investment to make it—especially investment and encouragement to make it here. And encouragement in a way that does not screw the locality through sucking up resources without paying for them.
I suggest that it’s not merely the Walmart effect. It’s really the lack of imagination and engineering coupled with too many finance majors.
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by Gary Mintchell | Feb 2, 2026 | Business, News, Security
I posted news last September that Mitsubishi announced plans to acquire cybersecurity firm Nozomi Networks. That acquisition is now complete.
The viability of all these cybersecurity firms as independent businesses has always sparked curiosity in me. The latest press release puts Nozomi revenues at about $100M. Not a sizable business by today’s standards. But their product certainly hits a sweet spot of demand for customers. Boards and insurers increasingly pressure management to assure security.
An acquiring firm of a generalist technology will always face concerns from companies who don’t use their products. Will we be phased out unless we switch suppliers. These concerns are addressed. Nozomi Networks assures customers it will be operating independently as a wholly owned subsidiary delivering vendor‑agnostic OT/IoT cybersecurity solutions to its global customer and partner community.
From the news release:
Nozomi Networks announced January 27, 2026 that Mitsubishi Electric Corp. has completed its acquisition of the company. Originally announced on September 9, the transaction marks the start of a new phase of growth for Nozomi Networks while preserving the company’s independent operations, vendor‑neutral technology roadmap, and established go‑to‑market partnerships. As a wholly owned subsidiary, Nozomi Networks will continue to support the full OT/ICS ecosystem with the same open, multi‑vendor approach that has made it a trusted partner to critical infrastructure operators worldwide.
I’m not sure how a company knows the financial details of its privately held competitors. But Nozomi Networks states it is also the first privately held OT cybersecurity company to achieve sustained cash flow and break‑even performance – further underscoring the strength of its model, the durability of its platform, and the confidence organizations place in its independent, vendor‑agnostic approach.
Other notable milestones the company achieved in 2025 include:
- Significant new and expanded partnerships with global technology leaders including Schneider Electric, Hitachi Cyber, Nvidia, Dispel, and Xona
- 24% employee headcount growth
- Among the fastest growing companies in North America on the 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500
- Named to Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies 2025 list
- Named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPS Protection Platforms and is a Leader in the Forrester Wave for IoT Security, as well as the only recognized Customers’ Choice in Gartner’s Voice of the Customer for CPS Protection platforms
- Recognized by Gartner as “The Company to Beat for AI in CPS Protection Platforms”
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