History of Main Swiss-Type Lathes Manufacturers

Star's roots go back to July 1950, when Star Manufacturing Co., Ltd. was set up in Tegoshi, in Japan's Shizuoka Prefecture, with a modest founding capital of ¥500,000. The company's original business had nothing to do with machine tools — it made wristwatch cases and camera components, industries that demanded tolerances far tighter than general-purpose metalworking equipment of the era could reliably hold. Rather than depend on outside suppliers for machines capable of that precision, Star's engineers built their own automatic lathe in-house to produce watch parts. That decision — designing a machine to solve your own production problem first, and only later realizing other manufacturers had the same problem — became the founding logic behind Star's entire machine tool division, and behind the wider Swiss lathes industry that eventually grew up around the same idea.

By August 1958, Star had turned that internal tool into a commercial product, beginning sales of a cam-type automatic lathe to outside customers. This marked the company's formal entry into the machine tool business, running alongside its original watch and camera parts operations. Two years later, in October 1960, Star entered a joint venture with Citizen Watch Co. — its eventual rival in the Swiss lathe market — to form Tokai Seimitsu Co., Ltd., a company set up specifically to mass-produce wristwatch screws. Star absorbed Tokai Seimitsu in September 1965 and took the name it carries today, Star Micronics Co., Ltd.

Export growth followed quickly. Star began shipping its sliding-headstock lathes to the United Kingdom in 1962, and the machines found a receptive audience among European precision manufacturers who valued their build quality and the originality of their engineering. The next major technical leap came in October 1976, when Star began manufacturing and selling CNC automatic lathes, moving its product line from mechanically cammed motion control to computer-driven axis control. A New Jersey-based sales subsidiary, Star Micronics America, Inc., opened the following year to support the growing North American customer base.

The 1980s brought rapid physical and organizational expansion: a new manufacturing plant at Kikugawa in 1984, a listing on the Nagoya Stock Exchange, and new sales subsidiaries across Europe, including operations in the UK (1984), Switzerland (1991), and Germany (1992). Star also began building manufacturing capacity outside Japan during this period, opening a facility in Dalian, China, in 1989. On the technology side, Star's CNC lathes through the 1980s and 1990s adopted Fanuc control systems and increasingly modular machine architectures, giving customers more flexibility in configuring a given model for a specific part family.

Star's push into the American market deepened in August 1995, when it acquired the Hirschman Corporation in New York; two years later, that subsidiary was renamed Star CNC Machine Tool Corp., which remains Star Micronics' exclusive US distributor and service arm today. Manufacturing capacity continued to grow through the 2000s and 2010s with new plants in Thailand (2005 and 2012) and a dedicated demonstration and applications facility, the Solution Center, completed at the Kikugawa factory in July 2020.

Technically, Star has built its modern reputation around a handful of proprietary systems: a slanted dovetail slideway design intended to add rigidity to the sliding headstock assembly, and the Star Motion Control system, which analyzes an NC program in advance to shorten the non-cutting time between operations by optimizing tool-change and axis-switching sequences — a good example of how the programming of Swiss lathes has evolved from raw G-code editing toward built-in software that handles part of the optimization automatically. Its product lineup, led by models such as the SR-20 series, has expanded to include Y-axis sliding and back-working capability, allowing complex, multi-sided parts to be finished in a single setup rather than requiring a secondary operation. At the high end, the SR-38B extends this approach to larger-diameter bar stock with a ten-axis configuration. These capabilities have made Star's lathes a common choice in medical device manufacturing, where biocompatible materials and tight tolerances are non-negotiable, as well as in aerospace and connector production. Star Micronics remains headquartered in Shizuoka and, as of the mid-2020s, continues to operate manufacturing and sales operations spanning Japan, China, Thailand, Europe, and the Americas.

Citizen's machine tool business shares a strikingly similar origin story to Star's, and for good reason — both grew out of the same demanding discipline: watchmaking. Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. was established in Tokyo in 1930 through a partnership between Japanese and Swiss investors, though the Citizen name itself dates back further, to a trademark registered in Switzerland in 1918 by watch importer Rodolphe Schmid. As Citizen's watchmaking operation grew through the 1930s, it ran into the same precision bottleneck Star would later encounter: the machinery available on the open market wasn't accurate enough to produce watch components to the company's standards. Citizen's engineers responded by building their own tooling in-house, and in 1937 that effort produced the B-0 automatic lathe — a sliding-headstock, cam-driven machine that would later serve as the direct conceptual ancestor of the entire Cincom line, one of the best-known Swiss-type lathes families in the industry today.

Citizen didn't begin selling machine tools to outside customers until 1961, more than two decades after it started building them for internal use. Over the following years, the company steadily broadened its automatic-lathe catalog, releasing sliding-headstock and fixed-headstock cam models through the 1950s and 1960s. The turning point came around 1970, when Citizen developed what it markets as the world's first NC (numerically controlled) automatic lathe, launched under a new brand name: Cincom, short for Citizen Numerically Controlled Machines. The Cincom D-16, introduced in 1971, became the line's first flagship model and won a Gold Award at the Leipzig Trade Fair in what was then West Germany — an early sign that Citizen's Swiss-type lathes could compete on the world stage, not just in Japan. A dedicated Precision Machinery Division was established within Citizen soon afterward to manage the growing machine tool business alongside the company's watch and electronics operations.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Cincom catalog expanded steadily — the E32 (1977), F-25 (1978), and F-12 (1980) sliding-headstock models each pushed the technology forward, adding capability for more complex parts and larger bar diameters. In 1992, Citizen acquired Boley GmbH, a German precision machine tool company with its own deep roots in watchmaking equipment: Boley had been founded in 1870 near Stuttgart by Gustav Adolf Boley, a former watch-shop apprentice who built a reputation manufacturing and patenting turret lathes and other precision tooling for the European watch trade. The acquisition gave Citizen a manufacturing and sales foothold in Europe under a name already trusted by generations of precision machinists there.

Citizen's other major product family, the Miyano line of fixed-headstock CNC lathes, began life as an entirely separate company. Miyano Machinery was founded in Tokyo in 1929 by Toshimori Miyano, initially producing precision industrial files rather than machine tools. The company built Japan's first cam-operated automatic lathe in 1948 and went on to specialize in fixed-headstock automatics known for high-rigidity spindle construction, hand-scraped slideways, and heavy platform-style machine beds — a different engineering emphasis than the sliding-headstock Cincom line, better suited to shorter, thicker workpieces than to long, slender parts. Citizen built a minority equity stake in Miyano beginning in the 1990s as part of a broader business alliance, and that relationship deepened over the following two decades until Miyano became a wholly owned subsidiary of Citizen Holdings Co. in 2010. The two companies formally merged their machine tool operations in April 2011, adopting the name Citizen Machinery Miyano Co., Ltd., which brought the fixed-headstock and sliding-headstock product lines under one corporate roof — a consolidation echoed in overseas markets as well, including a 2011 merger of the two companies' separate UK sales operations.

On the distribution side, Marubeni Citizen-Cincom was founded in 1984 as a joint venture between Citizen Machinery and Marubeni Corporation, a Japanese trading house with roots reaching back to 1858, to market and service Cincom machines across North America. After the Miyano merger, that distributor took on responsibility for Miyano sales and service in the region as well, giving Citizen a single North American channel covering both fixed- and sliding-headstock product lines. Citizen Machinery has since passed the milestone of over 100,000 automatic lathes shipped, and it maintains a corporate museum at its Karuizawa headquarters tracing the evolution of its automatic lathes from the Petermann-built machines Japanese watchmakers imported from Switzerland in the 1920s through to its current Cincom and Miyano ranges. Training centers attached to that distribution network still teach shops the fundamentals of Swiss-type lathes programming on both product lines.

Tsugami's origin story stands apart from Star's and Citizen's in one important respect: it didn't start in watchmaking, but in metrology. The company's earliest recorded work dates to June 1923, when its founders began researching and producing block gauges — the reference standards machinists use to calibrate measuring instruments — at a workshop in Tokyo's Honjo Ohira-cho district. That grounding in precision measurement, rather than precision watch parts, gave Tsugami a slightly different starting point than its two rivals, though it would eventually compete in the same Swiss lathes market, selling Swiss-type lathes alongside its metrology and grinding lines. The company was formally incorporated as Tsugami Mfg., Co., Ltd. in March 1937 in Nagaoka, in Japan's Niigata Prefecture, initially to continue and scale up its block gauge production.

Tsugami broadened its product range quickly. By 1939 it was producing thread milling machines and hydraulic universal cylindrical grinders, moving well beyond gauge blocks into general precision machine tools. In 1942, the company established a second entity, Tsugami Precision Engineering Industry Co., Ltd., and built a new factory at Saku-shi in neighboring Nagano Prefecture; that subsidiary was folded back into the parent company in 1945 and became known internally as the Shinshu Plant, which remains one of Tsugami's two principal Japanese manufacturing sites alongside Nagaoka. The years immediately following the war were unusually turbulent for Japanese machine tool makers: in 1946, even as Tsugami began producing grinding machines, thread and form rolling machines, and — in a sign of how far the company had to diversify to survive the era — sewing machines, occupation authorities also announced restrictions on machine tool production. Tsugami weathered that period and, in May 1949, listed its shares on the Tokyo, Osaka, and Niigata stock exchanges.

The company's entry into the Swiss-type lathe market specifically came in November 1957, with the start of production and sales of the T-7, its first sliding-headstock automatic lathe. This placed Tsugami's debut in the category roughly a generation after Star's and Citizen's own earliest automatic lathes, but the company moved quickly to establish itself as a serious competitor, winning national recognition for its engineering along the way — the Okochi Memorial Production Prize in 1968 for thread-rolling technology, and again in 1972 for gear-grinding machine development. In November 1970, the company adopted the name it carries today, Tsugami Corporation.

Tsugami's transition into CNC control followed a similar arc to its competitors: a gang-tool automatic lathe called the VCL, featuring a lead-turner function, arrived in 1973, and the company's first CNC composite automatic lathe line, marketed as the Mercury series, went on sale in 1978. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Tsugami's precision automatic lathes and machining centers picked up a string of industry design and automation awards — the PAN1 precision lathe and MA3 machining center in the 1980s, and the S20 series of CNC precision automatic lathes, which won both a Machine Design Award and an Automation Machinery Prize in the early 1990s. These accolades reinforced a reputation that, in North America especially, grew strong enough that machinists sometimes used the Tsugami name almost interchangeably with the term "Swiss lathe" itself, regardless of which manufacturer had actually built a given machine.

Tsugami's international expansion accelerated from the late 1980s onward. A Thai manufacturing subsidiary opened in 1989, among the earliest moves by a Japanese Swiss-lathe builder into Southeast Asian production. A Chinese subsidiary, Precision Tsugami (China) Corporation, followed in 2003 and grew into one of the company's most significant manufacturing bases, anchored by a large complex in the Pinghu Economic Development Zone of Zhejiang Province; that Chinese arm later listed separately on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2017. Tsugami also opened subsidiaries in Germany (2007), Korea (2010), and India (2011), rounding out a global sales and manufacturing footprint that today spans machining centers, grinding machines, and thread and form rolling equipment in addition to its core CNC precision automatic lathes and Swiss-type turning centers.

Hanwha breaks the pattern set by the other three manufacturers in one clear way: it isn't a Japanese watch or instrument maker that stumbled into machine tools, but a South Korean industrial conglomerate that built a dedicated machine tool business from a bearing manufacturer. It's also considerably younger as a Swiss-lathe brand — Hanwha didn't enter the CNC automatic lathe market until the 1980s, decades after Star, Citizen, and Tsugami had already established themselves — yet it has grown into the manufacturer most often named as the leading challenger to the three long-established Japanese builders, and is regularly marketed as Korea's top-selling CNC automatic lathe brand and one of the country's leading Swiss lathes manufacturers.

The company's roots trace to February 1953, when Shinhan Bearing Industry Co., Ltd. was established with a modest capital investment of five million won to manufacture industrial bearings. In 1964 the company was renamed Korea Bearing Co., Ltd. and brought into the Hanwha Group, the conglomerate whose own corporate lineage runs back to the Korea Explosives Company, founded in 1952. For roughly its first quarter-century, the business remained a bearing maker rather than a machine tool builder — a very different starting discipline from the watchmaking origins behind Star and Citizen, or the precision-metrology roots behind Tsugami.

The shift into machine tools began in July 1977, with the completion of a new Changwon factory, and the company changed its name to Korea Machinery Co., Ltd. in 1982 to reflect the broader manufacturing scope. The following year, in 1983, the company developed what is generally credited as Korea's first domestically engineered automatic lathe, marking its entry into the same category of precision automatic turning that Star, Citizen, and Tsugami had already spent decades refining. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s the company continued to expand its industrial base, acquiring the American company Universal Bearings Inc. in 1991 and completing a second Changwon factory the following year, before renaming itself Hanwha Machinery Co., Ltd. in 1994.

A significant strategic shift came in 1998, when the company sold its original bearing business to the German bearing manufacturer FAG, retaining a minority stake but effectively completing its transition from a bearing maker that also built machine tools into a dedicated machine tool company. In 2002, the business was spun off from Hanwha Corporation as an independent entity, still under the Hanwha Machinery name, giving it more direct control over its own product development and export strategy just as its CNC lathe lineup was maturing.

The 2000s brought the technical milestones that define Hanwha's current product line. In 2003 the company introduced the STL32H, described as Korea's first turret-type CNC automatic lathe, adding a hybrid guide-bush and turret configuration to its catalog. The following year it rolled out a full line of CNC automatic lathes spanning roughly 7 to 38 millimeters in bar capacity under the XD brand, which remains Hanwha's flagship Swiss-type series today. In 2006 the company developed the XD20, marketed as Korea's first non-guide-bush CNC automatic lathe, broadening its range beyond classic sliding-headstock Swiss turning into fixed-headstock-style automatic lathes built on the same platform. The company renamed itself Hanwha TechM Co., Ltd. in 2007 and, that same year, opened Hanwha Machinery America in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, giving it a direct sales and service presence in the U.S. market rather than relying solely on third-party distributors.

International manufacturing followed over the next decade, with production and support operations established in China and a sales office in Stuttgart, Germany, extending Hanwha's reach into the European market where Star, Citizen, and Tsugami were already well entrenched. In 2014 the machine tool business merged back into Hanwha Corporation, becoming the core of its Machinery division alongside the conglomerate's defense and global trading arms. That same period saw a parallel development elsewhere in the Hanwha Group: in 2015 Hanwha acquired Samsung Techwin, renaming it Hanwha Techwin, and in 2017 spun off a separate entity, Hanwha Precision Machinery, to house semiconductor and surface-mount-technology equipment; in 2018, Hanwha's CNC automatic lathe and broader machine tool business was folded into that same corporate family, consolidating decades of separately evolved precision-manufacturing expertise under one roof. The lathe business has since been reorganized several more times within the Hanwha Group's various machinery and precision-equipment divisions, a reflection of how actively the wider conglomerate restructures its industrial holdings.

Today, Hanwha's Swiss-type and CNC automatic lathes are sold internationally through Hanwha Machinery America and a network of regional offices and distributors spanning Europe and Asia, with a product range that includes the XD series of guide-bush and non-guide-bush automatic lathes from roughly 3 to 45 millimeters, the economy-oriented XP series, and the STL series of turret-type hybrid lathes that bridge Swiss-type sliding-headstock work and conventional fixed-head turret turning. The company regularly exhibits its automatic lathes at major international trade shows such as IMTS in Chicago, positioning its XD-series machines directly against the Cincom, Miyano, Star, and Tsugami product lines that had a multi-decade head start, and offering its own conversational controls for shops learning the programming of Swiss lathes on the XD platform for the first time.

Nomura's story starts in Japan in the 1940s, when the company was established as a general-purpose machine tool builder during the years surrounding the country's postwar industrial rebuilding. Unlike Star or Citizen, its early years weren't tied to watchmaking; Nomura first built a reputation as a solid, general machine tool maker before narrowing its focus to sliding-headstock turning. That specialization arrived in the 1960s, when the company brought out its first Swiss-type CNC lathes, entering the field around the same period Citizen was developing its own early numerically controlled machines, albeit at a far smaller scale — Nomura's Swiss-type lathes would go on to earn a reputation among Japanese job shops for exceptionally quiet, low-vibration running.

What set Nomura apart over the following decades had less to do with size than with manufacturing philosophy. The company leaned heavily on traditional hand-scraping, a centuries-old hand-fitting technique used to true up machine beds and slideways rather than relying on grinding alone, and it credits that approach with the unusually low vibration levels its lathes produce, even when cutting hardened tool steels that give other machines trouble. The method fits within the broader Japanese manufacturing tradition sometimes called "monozukuri" — a deep, almost obsessive attention to the physical fit and finish of a machine. Alongside this craftsmanship, Nomura also engineered its own tool-presetter systems to cut down changeover time between jobs, a practical response to a problem that matters more to smaller job shops than to dedicated high-volume production lines.

The 1980s brought a broader catalog, as Nomura added multi-axis CNC lathes to what had originally been a single-spindle Swiss-type lineup. Around this period the company settled its headquarters and main plant in Ome, a city on Tokyo's western outskirts with deep roots in precision machine tool manufacturing, and organized domestic technical support through separate East-Japan and West-Japan centers.

The most consequential changes in Nomura's corporate life came later, in the 2000s and 2010s. In August 2008 the business was reincorporated as Nomura DS Co., Ltd., headquartered at Imai in Ome. The "DS" reflected a relationship that deepened with the Korean company Daesung Hi-Tech Co., Ltd., which acquired Nomura DS outright in January 2014. Design and manufacturing stayed anchored in Japan even as ownership shifted to Korea — a structure that sets Nomura apart from Star, Citizen, and Tsugami, all of which have remained Japanese-owned throughout their histories, and one that runs in the opposite direction from Hanwha's own cross-border growth.

Today Nomura DS lathes reach the market through Daesung Hi-Tech's global sales division as well as Nomura's own Japanese network, with a further foothold in Southeast Asia through Nomura DS (SEA) Sdn. Bhd. in Kuala Lumpur and additional distributors across Asia, North America, and Europe. The current product range centers on the DS series — the DS-20 and DS-25 for smaller precision parts, and the larger DS-35 and DS-45 for bigger workpieces — alongside the long-running NN and YB series, with YB positioned as the flagship line for difficult, hard-to-machine materials. Outside of automatic lathes, the company has branched into tapping and hobbing machines, dental milling equipment, and glass processing machinery, serving aerospace, medical device, and automotive customers.

Ganesh's history begins in March 1985 in Southern California, where a small, family-run operation calling itself Ganesh Industries, LLC — later doing business as Ganesh Machinery, Inc. — first opened its doors. Rather than manufacturing Swiss lathes from the ground up the way the Japanese and Korean builders above do, Ganesh chose a different path from the start: engineer and brand the machines domestically, contract the actual production out to overseas factories, and back the finished product with hands-on service closer to home. That formula — American specification and support wrapped around Asian manufacturing — has defined the company for four decades and set it apart from every other name in this history.

Early growth was quick by industry standards. The original shop expanded from roughly 4,000 square feet to a considerably larger footprint within its first few years, eventually settling into a combined 15,000-to-20,000-square-foot engineering and showroom facility in Chatsworth, California, backed by a separate 40,000-square-foot parts and machine warehouse. Much of that growth traced back not to any single proprietary machine design but to customer-facing fundamentals that are easy to promise and harder to deliver consistently over decades: free phone-based training, deep in-stock parts inventories, and same-day shipping on replacement parts.

As the business matured, its catalog settled into three named product families. Genturn covered the company's Swiss-type lathes and multi-axis turning machines, anchored by the long-running Cyclone line of gang-tool and turret lathes — models such as the Cyclone-32GT and the twin-spindle Cyclone-32/42 GTS. Genmill covered vertical machining centers spanning three to five axes. And the original Ganesh name stayed attached to a simpler line of manual and CNC toolroom lathes and mills, aimed at schools and smaller shops that didn't need full production CNC capability. Every machine across all three lines was built under contract at ISO-9001-certified factories — historically concentrated in Taiwan, and more recently in Japan as well — with final assembly and quality checks completed back at the Chatsworth facility before machines shipped out to customers and dealers.

Ownership hit a rough patch in the back half of the 2010s. A 2015 attempt to bring in an outside investment partner didn't pan out, and the legal and financial fallout eventually forced a restructuring of the company. Leadership changed hands as well: Robert Serrano took over as president and CEO from previous chief executive Harvinder Singh. In October 2019 the business was formally renamed Expand Machinery, LLC. By the company's own account, the rename was mostly a paperwork exercise — the same Chatsworth facility, largely the same staff, and the same three product lines (Genturn, Genmill, and the legacy Ganesh toolroom brand) all carried forward unchanged.

Since the rename, Expand Machinery has kept extending the Genturn lineup with newer hybrid Swiss machines, including the eight-axis Genturn SL 20Y2 and the eight-axis Genturn-52CS Y2, a two-inch-bar-capacity mill/turn center built around a done-in-one machining approach. The company still exhibits at major trade shows such as IMTS, and the older Ganesh-branded Cyclone machines have picked up a strong reputation in the secondary market as some of the most frequently resold Swiss-type lathes in North America, largely on the strength of their durability and the company's ongoing parts and service support.

Nexturn is the youngest company in this history by a wide margin, and its founding story reflects a different competitive strategy than the others: rather than growing out of a watch shop, a bearing plant, or an American import house, it was set up from day one as a dedicated Swiss-type lathe manufacturer — building nothing but Swiss lathes from the start — built to challenge the already-established Japanese brands head-on.

The company was founded on July 18, 2000, in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, as Nexturn Co., Ltd. — a small-to-medium-sized machine builder relying on its own in-house engineering and know-how, explicitly positioning itself against far larger, decades-old manufacturers already dominant in the category. Rather than starting out with a broad general machine tool catalog and adding Swiss lathes later, the path most of the companies above actually took, Nexturn built its entire identity around sliding-headstock CNC automatic lathes from the outset, later expanding into fixed-head CNC lathe designs as well.

Its early export strategy leaned on independent overseas distributors rather than company-owned sales subsidiaries, a lighter approach suited to a newer, smaller manufacturer. In the United States, a Minnesota-based shop that had been buying and running Swiss lathes since the 1990s became the first importer of Nexturn machines sometime in the early-to-mid 2000s, bringing them in initially for its own production use before going on to resell more than a hundred units nationwide — a grassroots distribution channel quite different from the direct sales subsidiaries Star, Citizen, and Hanwha each eventually built. Absolute Machine Tools took on Nexturn representation not long afterward and has carried the line for close to two decades since, later joined by additional U.S. partners including Phillips Corporation.

On the product side, Nexturn steadily pushed into larger-diameter territory that had traditionally belonged to established turret and fixed-headstock builders. Its SA(B) series became the company's core lineup of seven-axis Swiss-type lathes, spanning basic guide-bushing machines from roughly 12 to 38 mm bar capacity, models with interchangeable guide bushings from 20 to 38 mm, and non-guide-bushing configurations reaching from 26 mm up to 51 mm. At the top end, Nexturn developed what it markets as the world's first CNC automatic lathe capable of handling 56 mm bar stock, alongside turret-style non-guide-bushing sliding-headstock machines built for 45, 56, and 67 mm diameters — a capacity range that extends well beyond what most Swiss-type builders offer as standard.

More recently the company has diversified and reorganized its corporate structure substantially. It began branching into medical robotics and AI-assisted manufacturing technology, and for a period operated under the name NexturnBioscience Co., Ltd. to reflect that broader ambition. In November 2025, following a merger with Roll Korea — a separate Korean manufacturer of precision hydraulic and structural components for excavators, loaders, and other construction equipment — the combined business was renamed Nexturn&RollKorea Co., Ltd., the name it carries today. The company is listed on Korea's KOSDAQ exchange and now operates facilities in both Yongin and Changwon, continuing to build CNC Swiss-type and fixed-head automatic lathes alongside its newer construction-equipment component and medical technology businesses.