NAGOYA, Japan — Here in a century-old factory in central Japan the size of six baseball stadiums, Mitsubishi Electric is building robots and other machines that can keep other production lines running — on their own.

At one automated station the length of a pool table, machinery swings, whirs and rotates as components are attached to a printed circuit board at a pace of up to 20 parts per second and then self-checked for proper soldering. Some of these boards in turn will go into industrial robots that the factory is producing for local carmakers, Taiwanese smartphone assemblers and South Korean chipmakers.

Mitsubishi Electric Nagoya Works, the Tokyo-based company’s largest factory by employee count, has been an unsung hero of Japan’s postwar manufacturing-led growth and of the rise of East Asia more broadly into the world’s production hub. While factory automation generates less revenue these days for Mitsubishi Electric than sales of air conditioners or automotive equipment, it is far more profitable.

In the fiscal year that ended in March, factory automation generated just as much operating profit as air conditioning did even though the robotics unit only produced about half as much revenue. Mitsubishi Electric forecasts the business will grow faster than any of its other major divisions except its small outer space and defense unit through March 2026. It is targeting annual revenues of 1 trillion yen ($6.96 billion) from factory automation within three years, while aiming to nearly double the unit’s profit margin to 20% from 11.6%.

Earlier this year, Jefferies analyst Sho Fukuhara raised his price target for Mitsubishi Electric shares nearly 50%, highlighting his expectations of “a cyclical recovery in main profit driver Factory Automation business to lead to a record-high” company operating profit margin in the current fiscal year.

Ahead of this expected upturn, however, the factory automation unit is under pressure from slowing economic momentum in China, a key market, and disappointing sales in many other countries of electric vehicles, whose manufacturers are also important customers.

But Mitsubishi Electric believes the long-term outlook remains bright.

“Demand for automation is a long-term trend, not only because populations are declining in major manufacturing economies such as China, Taiwan and South Korea, but also because the market is shifting from mass consumption to consumption of many products in small amounts,” Takahisa Tanaka, chief of Nagoya Works, said last month.

The International Federation of Robotics predicts that emerging Asia will be the main driver of demand for factory automation systems. Within the region, robot penetration remains low even as some countries start to experience labor shortages amid population aging and workers showing a preference for nonmanufacturing jobs.

But competition in these markets to sell automation systems is fierce, with Chinese robot makers a rising force in the industry. Said Damian Thong, head of Japan equity research at Macquarie Capital Securities: “The challenge is that everyone sees the same opportunity. Everyone sees India and Southeast Asia.”

Mitsubishi Electric “needs to improve its products and streamline its costs to make sure it is competitive against Siemens and ABB in those markets,” added Thong, who rates the Japanese company’s stock as “outperform.”

In more developed economies, Mitsubishi Electric’s automation and control devices are used by Foxconn and Samsung Electronics on device assembly lines and to transport products in Amazon.com warehouses.

One of the company’s machines can drill 6,000 holes into multilayer printed circuit boards each second at different depths. A 3D laser processor can form a car bumper entirely on its own. Another system can autonomously put together lithium-ion batteries for EVs. For some of these machines, Mitsubishi Electric commands a global market share of as much as 90%.

Outside the factory context, the company is developing a remote-controlled, multifunctional humanoid robot that could operate in outer space or on the lunar surface. It already showed off the prospects for its automation technology in space with the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), a self-navigating lander that was made for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and achieved the first pinpoint touchdown on the lunar surface in January.

SLIM managed to land within just a few meters of its target spot using its vision-based navigation system, which allowed the craft to adjust its course by comparing real-time visual images against its onboard database.

Industrial robots similarly use vision sensors to guide their robotic arms into precise positions for tasks such as welding, picking, painting and screwing. To Mitsubishi Electric’s credit, SLIM proved unexpectedly resilient, surviving three extremely cold weeklong lunar nights.

The 4,000 employees at Nagoya Works do not just make robots. Another key product is programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, which serve as the brains for other factory robots, including those produced by rivals such as Tokyo Electron, Yaskawa Electric and Daifuku.

PLCs allow an operator to rearrange and reprogram sequential tasks for robots and assembly lines right on a computer screen. Alongside Germany’s Siemens and Rockwell Automation of the U.S., Mitsubishi Electric is one of the global leaders in PLCs.

Beyond factory automation, Mitsubishi Electric has been narrowing its focus from general electronics to semiconductors, air conditioners and elevators, all segments in which the 103-year-old company is a top player.

So far this year, Mitsubishi Electric has announced plans to spin out a unit which develops EV motors and related components into a joint venture with Toyota Motor affiliate Aisin, sold off a logistics business and liquidated a small stake in chipmaker Renesas.

“If you look into the future, they could be even more focused on areas where they get rewarded for their good engineering products,” said Christian Heck, a portfolio manager at First Eagle Investments, a New York-based asset manager which has held shares in Mitsubishi Electric since 2018.

“As they progress in focusing the portfolio, becoming more capital efficient and improving the margins, the market will reassess the value the company is trading at,” he said.