SATO

Last Updated: 3rd November 2015
Analyst Coverage: Simon Holloway

SATO was founded in 1940 to develop, manufacture, and sell machinery for processing bamboo, rattan and palm. The company was incorporated in 1951. It developed a hand-held price marker in the 1960s. With the emergence of point-of-sale (POS) systems in the 1970s, SATO developed new hand labeler models that were compatible with optical character recognition (OCR) and barcodes. In 1981, the company invented the world’s first thermal transfer printer emerging as the leading manufacturer of in-store marking solutions. In 2003, SATO developed the first RFID printer in Japan.

SATO’s product portfolio includes:

• Barcode and Labelling Printers
• Price guns and Hand Labellers
• Scanners & Portable Terminals (SATO partners with scanner, portable data terminal and other device manufacturers)
• Labels, Tickets, Wristbands, Cards, Receipt paper and Ribbons
• Software – includes Label Design, All-In-One printer management utility, Special solutions for SAP, Oracle and Microsoft BizTalk RFID (all use XML)