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A '''machine tool builder''' in the broadest [[word sense|sense]] is a [[corporation]] or person that builds [[machine tool]]s. In the most common (and economically significant) sense of the term, a machine tool builder is a corporation whose business is building machine tools for sale to [[manufacturing|manufacturers]], who use them to manufacture products. The machine tools often make [[interchangeable parts]], which are assembled into subassemblies or finished assemblies, ending up sold to [[consumer]]s, either directly or [[business-to-business|through other businesses]] at intermediate links of a [[value added|value-adding chain]]. Alternatively, the machine tools may help make [[molding (process)|molds]] or [[die (manufacturing)|dies]], which then make the parts for the assemblies.
==Fluidity of roles==
Since many decades ago, the term "machine tool builder" implies a company that builds machine tools for sale to other companies, who then use them to manufacture subsequent products. Macroeconomically, machine tools are only means to ends (with the ends being the manufactured products); they are not the ends themselves. Thus it is in the nature of machine tools that there is a spectrum of relationships between their builders, their users, and the end users of the products that they make. There is always natural potential for the machine tool users to be the same people as the builders, or to be different people who occupy an intermediate position in the value stream. Markets often have some proclivity for circumventing such a position, although the proclivity is often not absolute. Every variant on the spectrum of relationships has found some instances of empirical embodiment; and over the centuries, trends can be seen for which variants predominated in each era, as described below.
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