Mitsubishi Electric Delegation Visits PDKJ For A Welding Technology Exchange

On 15 October 2026, PDKJ (Guangdong Pudian Automation Technology Co., Ltd) hosted a delegation from Mitsubishi Electric group companies for a full-day welding technology exchange at its manufacturing base in Dongguan, Guangdong. The theme of the day was set by the visitors themselves - a welding technology application exchange - and the programme was built around that idea rather than around a product presentation: registration and introductions, a capability briefing, a dedicated session for collecting and answering welding process questions, a walk through the production workshop, and then two full hours of trial welding in the sample showroom.

The visit is worth recording for a simple reason. The businesses represented on the delegation all make products in which a weld decides whether the part works. Air-conditioning compressors are welded pressure vessels. Electric power steering motors and ignition coils are copper assemblies whose joints have to stay electrically stable for the life of a vehicle. Lift car and landing doors are thin coated steel where a mark left by the electrode is a visible defect. The questions the delegation brought were therefore process questions rather than price questions - and process questions are the ones that get answered with a sample and a parameter sheet, not with a quotation.

Fourteen people took part, drawn from five organisations across the Mitsubishi Electric group: the corporate headquarters in Japan, three of the group’s manufacturing companies in China, and the group’s China organisation. Between them they covered compressor manufacturing, automotive electrical components, lifts and escalators, and central engineering support.

The scale of the group is what makes the day significant. Founded in 1921, Mitsubishi Electric now employs around 150,000 people across more than 200 group companies, and reported consolidated revenue of 5,894.7 billion yen - roughly US$36.8 billion - in the fiscal year that ended on 31 March 2026. Its business spans public utility systems, energy systems, defence and space systems, factory automation systems, automotive equipment, building systems, air conditioning systems and home products, digital innovation, and semiconductors and devices. Four of those segments were represented in the room.

Air-conditioning compressors. The Guangzhou compressor company is one of the group’s largest production sites in China, with a stated annual capacity of around eight million air-conditioning compressors and a range that runs from 1 HP to 16 HP, covering both rotary compressors and larger scroll machines. A compressor is a sealed pressure vessel. Its shell, its copper suction and discharge tube connections and the terminal pins that carry current through the shell are all welded or brazed joints, and every one of them has to hold refrigerant for the life of the air conditioner. A joint that is not gas-tight does not necessarily fail on the assembly line - it fails in a customer’s building years later, which is exactly why this part of the group came to look at process control rather than at machine price.

Automotive electrical components. The automotive components company in Changshu produces electric power steering systems, their electronic control units and ignition coils, and supplies vehicle makers across China from a site with several regional offices. These are copper-intensive parts. The armature and the windings have to be terminated with a joint that is low in resistance and stable over hundreds of millions of load cycles and constant thermal cycling, and the weld must not damage the insulation a few millimetres away. Resistance welding and laser welding both appear on this kind of part; choosing between them changes both the electrical behaviour of the joint and the amount of heat the part around it has to survive.

Lifts and escalators. The lift and escalator company in Zhongshan is the group’s mainland China elevator business, producing lifts, escalators, moving walks and mechanical parking systems and providing installation and maintenance across the country. Its welding is closer to conventional sheet metal work: car and landing door panels, frames, brackets and stiffeners in painted, galvanised or stainless sheet. The requirement is two-sided - predictable strength on structural joints, and no electrode marks or heat discolouration on visible surfaces, because on a lift door a cosmetic blemish is as much a defect as a weak weld.

The China organisation. The Shanghai branch of the group’s China company took part as the central platform for engineering and procurement support across the group’s Chinese businesses, which is how questions raised by one factory become relevant to the others.

The programme ran from 09:30 to 14:30 and was deliberately front-loaded with questions and back-loaded with hands-on time. The working route through the site was: meeting room, production workshop, sample room, showroom, rest area, showroom again, meeting room, and finally the front desk.

Two hours of trial welding is an unusual amount of time to give a visiting delegation, and it was the part of the day that produced the most useful output. Everything before it existed to make those two hours efficient.

Delegates signing in at the PDKJ reception desk before the start of the welding technology exchange on 15 October 2026.

The delegation arrived shortly after nine and signed in at the reception desk. Introductions followed, then a welcome address from PDKJ and an address from the visiting side, which set the tone for the day: this was to be an engineering exchange, not a sales visit.

The morning session in the PDKJ meeting room: the company introduction, followed by the block where the visiting engineers put their own welding process questions on the table.

PDKJ then gave a short introduction to the company and its four equipment lines - resistance spot welding machines, laser welding machines, robotic and automated welding systems, and customized welding machines built around a specific part. The important item on the agenda, however, was the session that followed: fifteen minutes reserved purely for collecting welding process questions from the visiting engineers. Business cards were exchanged at the same point so that every question raised in the room could be followed up by a named person on both sides.

The questions clustered into five groups, and they are the same five that come up on almost every technical visit of this kind:

• Copper and dissimilar metal joints. Copper-to-copper and copper-to-aluminium connections, where high thermal and electrical conductivity means heat is pulled away from the weld as fast as the process puts it in, and where an intermetallic layer can form at the copper-aluminium interface if the heat input is not controlled.
• Coated and thin sheet. Spot welding galvanised, coated and painted steel without leaving electrode marks or surface damage on a visible face, and keeping electrode life predictable when the coating contaminates the tip.
• Porosity, spatter and expulsion. Which defects are cosmetic and which are functional, and what the appearance of a bead actually tells you about the joint underneath.
• Parameter setting when the material changes. How current, electrode force and weld time have to move when the sheet thickness, coating or alloy changes, and how to find that window quickly instead of by trial and error on production.
• Verification. How to prove a joint is good without destroying the part - and what a peel test, a chisel test or a macro section of a sample actually proves about a production batch.

None of these can be settled in a meeting room. They are answered on a machine, with the customer’s own material, which is why the agenda moved the group to the sample room after lunch and left them there for two hours.

Touring the ground-floor production workshop, where machines are assembled, wired and tested before shipment.

After the break, the delegation walked the ground-floor production workshop. The group moved through the assembly bays between the overhead gantry cranes, along the marked transport lanes, stopping at machines in different stages of build.

A workshop tour is not a formality in this kind of exchange. A welding machine can look identical in a catalogue and be a very different product in reality, depending on how the frame is fabricated, how the transformer and the electrode arms are mounted, how the control cabinet is wired and how much testing is done before the machine is packed. Delegates who build their own production equipment spend their time looking at exactly those details - the fixtures, the cabling, the alignment of the electrode arms, the fit of a door panel on its frame - and the questions they ask on the shop floor are usually sharper than the ones they ask in the meeting room.

The walk continued into the sample showroom, where finished machines are set up for trial welding rather than for display, and then the delegation broke for lunch before returning to start the practical part of the day.

In the second-floor sample showroom: delegates watching a laser welding head run and checking the finished weld on a demonstration part.

The second-floor showroom is where the exchange was actually decided. From eleven to twelve, and again from one to two, the visiting engineers stood at working machines with samples in their hands: watching a laser welding head run a seam, checking the penetration and the bead shape on a section, marking up parts, comparing a marked electrode finish against a non-marking one, and asking for parameters to be changed and run again.

This is the point of the whole format. A trial welding session produces three things that a brochure cannot. First, a physical sample: the visiting engineers leave with the part that was welded, not a photograph of somebody else’s part. Second, a starting parameter set - current, electrode force, weld time, laser power, focus position, travel speed - that has been tuned on the material they actually use. Third, and most valuable, a verdict on feasibility: whether the joint they need is achievable at all, and if the process needs a fixture, a shielding gas, a cleaning step or a different joining method to get there.

For a part like a compressor shell connection or an armature termination, that verdict is worth more than a specification sheet, because it is the only thing that tells the engineer whether the production problem in front of them is solvable with the process they had in mind.

The follow-up discussion at 14:00 pulled the results together: which samples had been welded, what the parameters were, which parts needed a second attempt with a different approach, and what information PDKJ needs from each of the group’s businesses before a proposal can be made. The exchange closed with a short summary and a group photograph.

Group photo of the PDKJ team and the visiting delegation at the close of the exchange.

Nothing about this day was special to Mitsubishi Electric. The format - an open question session, an unguided look at the production floor, and two hours of trial welding on your own material - is how PDKJ works with any customer who has a part that is difficult to weld. You do not need to be a multinational to book it, and there is no obligation to buy anything at the end of it.

If you are dealing with a joint you have not welded before - copper to aluminium, coated thin sheet that must stay mark-free, a sealed connection that has to hold pressure, or a part where you are not sure whether resistance welding or laser welding is the right process - the efficient way to settle it is to send a sample and a drawing, or come and weld it yourself. The output is a welded part, a parameter set and an honest answer about feasibility, including an answer of "not this way" if that is the truth.

Visits of this kind also work in the other direction. Several of the questions raised on the day are now feeding back into how PDKJ configures equipment for compressor, automotive and sheet metal applications, because the requirements of a production line that runs for years are a better specification than any laboratory test.

The exchange on 15 October 2026 covered compressors, automotive electrical components, lifts and escalators, and the joining problems that come with them: copper and copper-aluminium joints, mark-free welding of coated steel, defects that matter and defects that do not, parameter setting when the material changes, and how to verify a joint without scrapping the part. The pattern of the day - questions first, machines second, and as much trial welding as the visiting engineers could use - is the pattern we would recommend to any buyer who has to commit to a welding process.

PDKJ continues to provide customized laser welding and resistance welding solutions based on different materials, workpiece structures, welding requirements, and production applications.

• LSW-1500 Platform type non-marking laser welding machine
• Robot Integrated Fiber Laser Welding Workstation
• Robotic Laser Welding Workstation With Automatic Fiber Laser Welding Machine
• Platform Type Intermediate-Frequency Inverter Seamless Spot Welding Machine
• Capacitor Discharge (convex) Spot Welding Machine
• DTB-80 Industrial Vertical Medium Frequency Inverter Spot Welder
• All PDKJ Welding Machines

Send us your part drawing or a sample, and our engineers will run a welding feasibility trial on your own material and recommend the equipment configured for your application.