The most profitable company in Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century was Keyence, making sensors, barcode readers, digital microscopes, and various types of high precision measuring equipment. The second most profitable non-pharma firm was the robotics maker Fanuc specializing in automated systems. The third was Hirose Electric manufacturing a range of connectors used in everything from printers to copy machines to flat-panel displays. Numbers four and five were, respectively, Pacific Metals, Japan’s largest ferro-nickel producer, and Union Tool, which specializes in drills,
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