Gene Haas - Haas Automation

Haas Automation

Haas graduated from California State University Northridge in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Finance. He originally majored in engineering but switched to business after Lockheed nearly went bankrupt. Ironically, after graduation he was unable to find employment in business that paid more than what he was earning at his summer machine shop job. So, for the next few years he worked as a machinist and CNC programmer. In 1978, he opened Pro-turn Engineering, a small machine shop with two employees; Tony Cortez and Abel Bugarin.

In 1980, Haas noticed that it took Bugarin a long time to manually position an indexer. Haas thought building his own indexer with a stepper motor drive would make his shop more efficient. He built one for himself and few more for other machine shops. In March 1983, he displayed his indexer at WESTEC (an industry expo). After seeing the positive reaction of attendees, he decided to form Haas Automation to mass produce them. His first commercial product, the HBI-5C (Haas Brothers Indexer), sold well because it was programmable and inexpensive. In 1986, Haas and a partner were awarded a U.S. Patent for their invention.

In 1988 Haas started production on a fully enclosed CNC machining center priced at $49,900, well below the competition. Some believed Haas copied or reverse engineered this machine but at the time existing machines were so hard to use that Haas used them as an example of what not to do. Over time, Haas machine tools became extremely popular, mostly because they are simple, very affordable, and because the in-house designed computer control is operator-friendly (no soft-keys or cryptic menus).

By 1996, Haas had outgrown its facilities in Chatsworth, California and began a search that ultimately brought it to the coastal community of Oxnard, California. In March 1997, the move was completed into the Oxnard factory, a 420,000-square-foot (39,000 m2) facility. By 2005, the factory had been expanded to 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2).

Haas Automation is now the largest machine tool manufacturer in the United States. Sales for 2008 reached a record reportedly just under $1 billion worldwide.