In 1983, Gene Haas founded Haas Automation to manufacture the industry's first fully automatic programmable collet indexer - the Haas 5C indexer. Designed to increase production in Mr Haas' own machine shop, over the next four years, the product line expanded to include a wide selection of fully programmable rotary tables, indexers and machine tool accessories.

In 1988, Haas Automation achieved another industry milestone by introducing the first American-built vertical machining centre to sell for less than $50,000. The Haas VF-1 sold for a published price of $49,900, and quickly became an industry benchmark for affordable CNC technology.

Today, 25 years later, Haas Automation is one of the world's leading manufacturers of CNC machine tools - building, selling and shipping more machines per month than any other single builder in the Western World, according to the company. All Haas products are manufactured in the company's 1,000,000ft² facility in Southern California and distributed through a worldwide network of more than 120 Haas Factory Outlets. Each HFO has complete showroom facilities, factory-trained service personnel, extensive spare-parts inventories and fully-stocked service vehicles to provide high levels of service and support.

From the start, Haas Automation has aimed to provide reliable, affordable machine tool solutions - at published prices - to job shops and contract manufacturers around the world, relying on volume sales rather than per-unit profit to build the company. Extensive use of lean manufacturing methods and just-in-time production practices allows Haas Automation to produce high-precision CNC products while maintaining exacting quality and value-based pricing.

At present, there are more than 85,000 Haas CNC machines and 53,000 Haas rotary products in use around the world. In 2008, the company will build more than 14,000 machines, with around 60% bound for international markets.

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