There’s been a big development in manufacturing services: Fictiv has been acquired by MISUMI.
Readers may recall that twelve-year-old Fictiv is a California-based manufacturing network, where build requests are dispatched to a large network of partner manufacturers. Like the other major manufacturing networks, they’ve been doing reasonably well, with operations in India, Mexico, China, and the US.
MISUMI is a gigantic Japanese conglomerate specializing in providing components for industrial automation. They have over 30,000 corporate customers and over 20M configurable parts. Some 30,000+ parts are available for same-day shipping. They operate MISUMI USA as their North American subsidiary.
MISUMI USA announced a merger with Fictiv for a fee of US$350M.
This is quite interesting because of MISUMI’s business model, which ”combines manufacturing and distribution businesses.” They’ve developed a new digital model they call “meviy”, which describes as follows:
“The first of these, meviy, is an on-demand procurement service that allows for instantaneous quotations and delivery in as little as one day by simply uploading design data (3D-CAD data) for machine parts.”
That sounds awfully similar to what Fictiv does: accept designs and print them. MISUMI explains:
“By acquiring Fictiv, we will rapidly increase the value we provide from the traditional realm of production equipment to the upstream area of product development within the value chain, establishing a significant starting point for sustainable growth. While the Company and Fictiv share similarities in business content and values, we excel in different areas in terms of product categories and regions of operations. By welcoming Fictiv into the MISUMI Group, we believe we can leverage the strengths of both companies to create synergistic effects. Going forward, we will continue to expand our services globally to eliminate inefficiencies in the IA industry and enhance the ‘Customer’s Time Value.’”
I’m particularly interested in how MISUMI’s gigantic parts catalog will now be directly deployable through Fictiv’s manufacturing network. It’s almost as if MISUMI gained a massive sales and distribution operation. Well, that’s precisely what happened.
Via MISUMI
