Most manufacturing plants in the United States run on equipment that predates the smart factory era. A 2003 CNC mill, a PLC installed during the Clinton administration, a packaging line that speaks a serial protocol nobody under forty has heard of.

These machines still make good parts, which is exactly why nobody wants to rip them out. The problem appears when the business asks for data: OEE dashboards, downtime analysis, energy monitoring, predictive maintenance. Suddenly the plant discovers that its most productive assets are also its most silent ones.

The good news is that you do not need a capital project to make legacy equipment talk. What you need is a structured approach to connectivity. Here is how to do it, step by step.

Step 1: Audit what you actually have

Before buying anything, walk the floor and build an asset inventory. For every machine you want data from, record four things: the controller make and model, the communication interface it exposes (Ethernet, RS-232/485, proprietary fieldbus, or nothing at all), the protocol it speaks, and the firmware version.

This sounds tedious, and it is. It is also the single highest-value activity in the entire project. Plants that skip this step end up buying gateways that cannot talk to half their equipment, or discovering mid-project that a critical machine only exposes data through a maintenance port the vendor locked years ago.

A typical brownfield audit in a mid-sized US plant surfaces somewhere between five and fifteen distinct protocols: Modbus RTU and TCP, Allen-Bradley DF1 and EtherNet/IP, Siemens S7, Fanuc FOCAS, GE SRTP, Mitsubishi MELSEC, plus a few vendor-specific oddities. Write them all down. This list drives every decision that follows.

Step 2: Decide which data matters before you collect any of it

The instinct is to collect everything and sort it out later. Resist it. Every tag you poll consumes network bandwidth, gateway capacity, and storage, and most of it will never be looked at.

Start from the business question instead. If the goal is downtime analysis, you need machine state, fault codes, and timestamps. If it is quality, you need process parameters tied to part IDs. If it is energy, you need power draw per asset. A focused list of 20 to 50 tags per machine usually covers the first two or three use cases. You can always expand later; it is much harder to untangle a data lake full of unlabeled noise.

This is also the moment to define naming conventions. A tag called Line3_Press2_MotorTemp_degF will still make sense in five years. A tag called N7:42 will not.

Step 3: Put a protocol translation layer between machines and everything else

Here is the architectural decision that determines whether the project scales or stalls. You have two options for getting data out of legacy controllers.

The first is point-to-point integration: custom drivers, vendor utilities, or scripts that connect each machine directly to each consuming application. This works for one machine and one dashboard. It collapses at plant scale, because every new machine or application multiplies the number of connections you have to build and maintain.

The second, and the one that has become standard practice in industrial environments, is a dedicated connectivity layer: an industrial connectivity platform such as Kepware by Velotic that sits between the machines and the applications. The platform speaks the native protocol of each device on one side (Kepware alone ships with more than 150 drivers covering most controllers built in the last three decades) and presents the data through open standards on the other. Applications no longer care whether the source is a 1998 Modbus device or a brand-new OPC UA server; they see one consistent interface.

The practical benefit for legacy equipment is significant. A serial-only machine gets connected through a serial-to-Ethernet converter, the connectivity server polls it in its native protocol, and from that point on it behaves like any modern asset. No PLC reprogramming, no firmware upgrades, no downtime beyond the commissioning window.

Step 4: Normalize the data into open standards

Getting bits off the machine is only half the job. The other half is making those bits usable by systems that were never designed for factory floors: MES, historians, cloud analytics, ERP.

Two standards do most of the heavy lifting here. OPC UA provides secure, structured, vendor-neutral access for on-premises systems such as SCADA and MES. MQTT, often with the Sparkplug B specification, handles lightweight publish-subscribe messaging to cloud platforms and IIoT applications. A good connectivity layer outputs both simultaneously from the same source data; Kepware, for example, can serve a legacy Modbus tag to a local MES over OPC UA while publishing the same tag to a cloud platform over MQTT, so you are not forced to choose between the plant network and the cloud.

Normalization also means adding context. Raw register values become named tags with engineering units, scaling, and metadata about which line, cell, and asset they belong to. Do this once, at the connectivity layer, and every downstream application inherits clean data. Do it separately in every application, and you will spend years reconciling mismatched numbers between reports.

Step 5: Treat security as part of the design, not an afterthought

Connecting a 20-year-old controller to the network changes its risk profile. Legacy protocols like Modbus have no authentication and no encryption; anyone on the network segment can read or write to the device.

The mitigation is architectural. Keep native, insecure protocols confined to a segmented OT network. Let the connectivity server act as the security boundary: it talks Modbus or DF1 downward, inside the protected segment, and exposes only encrypted, certificate-authenticated OPC UA or TLS-secured MQTT upward. Disable write access for any tag that does not strictly require it. Log who connects and what they read.

This pattern, sometimes described as a secure data diode for legacy equipment, lets you extract value from old machines without extending their attack surface into the enterprise network.

Step 6: Start with one line, then scale the template

Pick one production line for the pilot. Ideally one with a mix of old and new equipment, a clear business question, and a supervisor who wants the data. Connect it, build the first dashboard, and measure the result for four to six weeks.

Then, and this is the part most projects miss, turn what you built into a template: the tag naming convention, the driver configurations, the security settings, the documentation. Rolling out to the second line should take a fraction of the time the first one did. Plants that follow this pattern typically connect their remaining lines in weeks rather than months.

The bottom line

Legacy machines are not a barrier to plant data; unmanaged protocol diversity is. Audit your assets, define the data you need, translate everything through one connectivity layer, normalize into OPC UA and MQTT, secure the boundary, and scale from a pilot. The machines that have been quietly making parts for twenty years have plenty to say. You just need to give them a common language.

Shares of Nintendo fell 5.72% on Friday, dropping 466 yen to close at 7,679 yen in Tokyo trading, even as the broader Nikkei 225 index surged more than 4% during the same session, underscoring how directly the ongoing global memory chip shortage continues to weigh on the video game maker’s stock even amid a broader market rally.

Friday’s decline stood out against the backdrop of a powerful rebound across Asian technology stocks, driven by blowout earnings from Microsoft, Amazon and Meta Platforms that sent chipmakers surging worldwide. But that same rally in memory chip prices, driven by tight global supply and surging demand tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure, has become an increasingly acute problem for Nintendo specifically, since the company relies heavily on memory components to manufacture its Switch 2 console.

Nintendo has repeatedly flagged rising memory chip costs as a direct threat to its profitability throughout 2026. When the company reported earnings in February, its stock slid as much as 11% in Tokyo trading after Nintendo missed market estimates for quarterly revenue and flagged mounting headwinds from what it described as an unprecedented shortage of memory chips, even as profit growth for the nine-month period remained strong. The company’s shares fell again in May, dropping between 7% and 8.4% after Nintendo confirmed it would raise the retail price of the Switch 2 in European, U.S. and Japanese markets by 7% to 20% later in the year specifically because of higher component costs, with memory chips cited as the primary driver.

The company’s most recent full-year results, reported in May, showed operating profit for the fiscal year ending March 31 climbing nearly 28% to 360 billion yen, or roughly $2.29 billion, aided by a near-doubling of net sales. Despite that strong headline growth, the profit figure still fell short of market expectations. Nintendo’s forecast for the current fiscal year proved considerably more cautious, with the company projecting operating profit of just 370 billion yen, well below market forecasts of 480 billion yen, and forecasting a sales decline of 11.4% year-on-year to 2.05 trillion yen. Nintendo specifically guided for weaker Switch 2 sales in the current fiscal year, citing the planned price increases tied to component cost pressure, with the company forecasting fiscal 2027 Switch 2 unit sales of 16.5 million, down from 19.86 million units sold in the prior year.

Not every analyst has viewed Nintendo’s recent stock weakness as fully justified by the underlying fundamentals of the business. Speaking following the company’s May guidance, Morningstar analyst Ito described Nintendo’s shares as undervalued relative to the company’s longer-term prospects. “We view Nintendo’s shares as undervalued,” Ito said. “The market appears overly focused on near-term headwinds and conservative guidance, while underappreciating the long-term earnings growth from over 100 million Switch users migrating to the new platform and increasing game purchases.”

Nintendo’s stock has continued to face pressure from sources beyond memory chip costs alone throughout the year. Shares fell more than 7% in June after the company’s latest Nintendo Direct presentation disappointed investors by failing to unveil a new mainline entry in the Super Mario franchise, with the showcase instead centered on a remake of “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” and other previously established titles. Reports had separately indicated that the next major Mario title would not arrive until 2027 rather than during Nintendo’s ongoing 40th anniversary celebrations for the franchise this year.

Nintendo’s next detailed quarterly earnings release is scheduled for August 6, according to the company’s investor relations disclosures, giving the market its next formal opportunity to assess how the combination of rising memory chip costs, planned price increases and the broader software release pipeline are affecting the company’s financial trajectory heading into the back half of the fiscal year.

The stock’s 52-week trading range spans from a low of 6,544 yen to a high of 14,795 yen, according to recent trading data, illustrating the scale of the decline Nintendo shares have experienced over the past year even as the underlying Switch 2 console has continued to post strong unit sales figures relative to Nintendo’s own historical hardware launches. Nintendo’s current price-to-earnings ratio stands at approximately 21.07, with the stock currently offering a dividend yield of roughly 2.85%.

Friday’s decline adds to what has already been a volatile year for Nintendo’s stock, with shares having fallen nearly 45% over the trailing 12-month period at various points during 2026, according to recent market analysis, even as the company’s Switch 2 console continued setting new sales records relative to prior Nintendo hardware generations. With global memory chip prices continuing to climb amid what rival Samsung Electronics has separately warned could be a supply shortage persisting through 2028, investors are likely to keep close watch on how Nintendo’s profit margins hold up in the coming quarters, particularly given the company’s heavy reliance on memory components across its flagship gaming hardware.

As Chris Best, the co-founder and chief executive of Substack put it last week: “It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet.”

Announcing a new tool, external designed to let readers on the newsletter platform detect AI-generated writing, Best cited other research that has found up to 40% of writing on social media is now fake or AI-generated.

“Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom,” Best said.

LinkedIn, a social media platform focused on work, introduced a button on its platform this week that allows any user to report if a post or a comment appears to be AI-generated.

“AI slop is a top priority for all of us,” LinkedIn’s chief product officer Hari Srinivasan wrote on the platform.

In just the last couple of months, he said the platform had “blocked billions” of attempts to post AI-generated comments.

“Every day we are now catching hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts,” Srinivasan said.

Like Snap, LinkedIn said it is not rejecting the use of AI entirely and users that use AI tools to “refine” their posts should not get caught up in efforts to combat AI slop.

Nonetheless, LinkedIn is removing an automated prompt that would show up for users writing a post offering to “enhance” it through the use of AI. It will go back to a simple proofreading tool.

YouTube, the video platform owned by Google, also this month updated its policies, external around what kind of content can be monetised by creators.

Research from last year found scores of channels on YouTube that were solely AI-generated content, external, many of which had millions of subscribers and some of which made millions of dollars in revenue.

In an effort to discourage YouTube from filling up with what the platform calls “inauthentic content”, earlier this month the site broke down into three categories the kind of videos that will not be allowed to make money through it: generic, repetitive, or template-based.

Those styles of content are much easier to make, and quickly, with the use of generative AI tools.

YouTube’s trust and safety chief Matt Halprin said in an interview, external on the updated rules that, while AI tools can help people with their content, they are more frequently being used to create fake and low-quality videos.

“The same technology really enables great stuff,” Halprin said.

“But it also enables stuff that’s kind of content farming, and that’s the stuff that we don’t want to have.”

Conference Call Participants

Arpine Kocharyan – UBS Investment Bank, Research Division
John Heinbockel – Guggenheim Securities, LLC, Research Division
Randal Konik – Jefferies LLC, Research Division
Molly Baum – Morgan Stanley, Research Division
Anthony Bonadio – Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division
Benjamin Chaiken – Mizuho Securities USA LLC, Research Division
Weili Chen – Mizuho Securities USA LLC, Research Division
Eric Des Lauriers – Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC, Research Division
Chris Woronka – Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division
Owen Rickert – Northland Capital Markets, Research Division
Logan Reich – RBC Capital Markets, Research Division
Andrew Chasanoff – Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division

Presentation

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I’m Constantinos, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Eurobank conference call to present and discuss the second quarter 2026 financial results. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Fokion Karavias, CEO. Mr. Karavias, you may now proceed.

Fokion Karavias
CEO, Member of Executive Board & Executive Director

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, and welcome to the Eurobank First Half 2026 Results Presentation. Together with me is our CFO, Harris Kokologiannis, and the Investor Relations team. We will start with some key recent developments, then present our results and answer your questions.

The global environment remains agile and challenging with geopolitical developments weighing on market sentiment and adding to inflation. Inflationary pressures will push euro rates higher even as the European economy remains subdued despite a better-than-expected second quarter performance. Nevertheless, the economies in the regions where we operate have so far demonstrated remarkable resilience, supported by a number of factors. First, investment activity remains robust. In Greece, in particular, the government recently unveiled a EUR 23 billion national development program for the period 2026 to 2030, focused on infrastructure, climate resilience and regional economic convergence. Second, the tourism sector continues to demonstrate resilience. In both Greece and Cyprus, tourist arrivals rebounded swiftly and current trends point to a season broadly in line with last year’s strong performance.

How do you view this victory of Narendra Modi and the BJP? And how will it impact the Indian economy?

We want India to do well. This election has ensured that there’s political stability for the next five years. A decisive leadership would mean tougher decisions, and no good governance is possible without tough decisions. The BJP-led NDA has a clear mandate to take bold and innovative decisions. International politics is not about zero-sum game and while India would economically engage other powers, EU has the potential to drive growth in India. EU is already the single biggest trading partner as a bloc, and is the single largest source of FDI for India as a bloc. We are ready to meet India’s needs in the fields of technology and funds.

You have interacted with Modi when he was the Gujarat Chief Minister. How do you rate him as a leader of modern India?

As a former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Portugal, I had interacted with various leaders worldwide and I can say that Mr Modi is among the best. He has clarity of thought and clear vision of governance and that’s what India requires. He also has a very clear understanding of the challenges before the country. He is a good listener as well as a good talker and can engage in enriching discussions. No Prime Minister would like to have communal strife on his record, and I am certain that he would not allow any communal tensions in India. His priority is to boost the economy and he has his eyes set on that.

Where do India-EU relations go from here? What are the priority areas for India-EU and what’s the future of Free Trade Agreement that’s being negotiated for many years now?