■Company Overview
1. Company Overview
Mimaki Engineering ＜6638＞ is a major industrial inkjet printer, and provides one-stop development, manufacturing, sales, and maintenance services for various inkjet printers, cutting plotters, 3D printers, and ink and software used in such products according to customer needs. The company is a development enterprise with the ultimate development goal of “being able to print on anything other than water and air,” and is constantly introducing advanced and unique high value-added products to the market that are particular about “newness and difference.” There are three sales markets: the SG market, which supports the production of advertisements and signs, etc., the IP market, which decorates industrial products and small items for general consumers, and the TA market, which prints and dyes fabrics and ready-made clothes, and they are developing a global business with an overseas sales structure ratio of about 70% with local sales power.
The turning point was the shift from electronic components to pen plotters
2. HISTORY
The company was established in 1975/8 in Nagano Prefecture for the purpose of assembling crystal oscillators for watches. We developed an A2 size flatbed pen plotter* in-house in 1983, and launched the “Hokusai” brand pen plotter, which became popular for its beautiful circular arc drawing with numerical control, in 1985. Taking this opportunity, we entered the manufacture and sale of large plotters, and in 1987 they sold cutting plotters using an eccentric cut method, and the world's first inkjet printer equipped with water-based pigment ink were sold, and in 1996, the business shifted from electronic components to the development and manufacture of products that made use of pen plotter technology. After that, they continued to develop high value-added products and promoted nationwide and global expansion of sales. For this reason, it has continued to grow steadily, but due to the spread of the novel coronavirus infection (hereinafter, COVID-19), it has temporarily reached a landing of growth. Currently, we have achieved a V-shaped recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic through the medium- to long-term growth strategy “Mimaki V10,” and we have just entered a regrowth period.
※ (Pen) plotter: Used for drafting and designing buildings and machines using X/Y values. A plotter with something other than a pen attached to it is called a penless plotter, and one that cuts film, etc. with a knife attached to it is called a cutting plotter.
Industrial inkjet printers are becoming increasingly digitized
3. Main product features
(1) Cutting Plotter
A cutting plotter is a machine that can cut out films, etc., as designed on a computer with a knife attached to a plotter, and is used when creating stickers, posters, and signs. Cutting plotters evolved signboard making into the process of simply pasting characters cut out from handwriting by craftsmen, and played a major role in the digitalization of signboard making. Not only is craftsmanship required to make signboards no longer necessary, but since film does not fade even after a few years compared to paint that fades after 1 year, outdoor weather resistance of signboards has also been greatly improved.
The cutting plotter sold by the company in 1987 adopted an eccentric cut method for the first time in the world, and received great acclaim because even kanji with a large number of strokes can be cut quickly without raising or lowering the cutter, and it was an opportunity for awareness of the company's products to improve at signboard production sites. Even now that graphical signs using inkjet printers have become mainstream, the company's cutting plotters operate as indispensable equipment at production sites around the world, such as being used to cut out heat transfer rubber sheets when creating printed T-shirts. Note that there are two types of cutting plotters, a roll type and a flatbed type, and the roll type cuts a roll-shaped sheet, and the flatbed type cuts by placing the material on a stand. Even materials that are thick or hard and cannot be rolled can be cut to some extent if it is a flatbed type.
(2) Industrial inkjet printers
It is a device that prints by ejecting dot-like ink, and basically operates on the same principle as a household inkjet printer. The difference lies in the application; while a home printer prints letters, photographs, etc. on paper, an industrial printer can print on a wide variety of materials such as plastic, glass, wood, and cloth. As for size, while household use prints on relatively small paper, mainly A4 size, it is possible to print on boards and three-dimensional objects about the size of four and a half square meters for industrial use. Prices are tens of thousands of yen for home use, while there are various printers for industrial use, depending on the print speed, size, and ink they are mounted on, and they are expensive and range from around 1 million yen to several tens of millions of yen. As for ink, while household ink is water-based, there are a wide variety of inks for industrial use, and there are many functional inks with chemical resistance, water resistance, durability, light resistance, abrasion resistance, etc., such as “won't fade even outdoors,” “won't flow down in water,” and “won't fall off even when rubbed.”
Also, unlike conventional analog printing, which requires time, inventory risk, and plate making costs, industrial inkjet printers are digitized and no longer require a printing plate, so digital on-demand production of “as much as needed when necessary” is now possible. It does not assume mass production, mass sales, or mass consumption based on conventional expectations, and simultaneously realizes made-to-order production of a wide variety of products, short delivery times, and low costs, and is attracting high attention in the industry as a solution that responds to diversifying printing needs. Additionally, conventional analog printing requires wastewater treatment to clean plates, but industrial inkjet printers discharge ink only to the pattern part, so the amount of ink required for printing and the amount of wastewater is extremely small, and it can be said that it is an ecological production system that responds to the needs of the times. Also, there are two types of industrial inkjet printers: roll type and flatbed type.
(Written by FISCO Visiting Analyst Miyata Hitomitsu)
