Company history

In April 1908 Yasui Kanekichi, an engineer who had left the Atsuta arsenal, opened a small shop in Nagoya buying up, repairing and reselling second-hand Singer sewing machines; Meiji Japan had no precision-machining industry able to build a sewing machine of its own, and imports ruled the market. When Kanekichi died in 1925, his eldest son Yasui Masayoshi took over the trade, joined by his younger brothers and sisters — ten siblings in all — and that November the shop was renamed the Yasui Sewing Machine Brothers Company, formalising the family enterprise from which the eventual brand, BROTHER, would take its name.

The habit that would define the company appeared at once: rather than buy its tools, it built them. In 1928, as the recession shrank repair demand, the brothers machined their own eccentric lathe and developed a chain-stitch machine for making straw hats — owning the machining before the machine. In 1932, with Singer holding some 90% of the market and the drain of foreign currency a national concern, Masayoshi completed a domestic household sewing machine; as Singer withdrew under the wartime economy, the brothers incorporated to fill the gap, founding Nippon Sewing Machine Manufacturing in Nagoya in January 1934 — twenty-six years from a repair counter to a domestic manufacturer.

Sewing machines sold seasonally and left the plant idle for months, so the brothers did what they would keep doing: redeploy their machining into new lines — knitting and washing machines from 1954, refrigerators from 1957 — and home appliances would supply a tenth to a fifth of sales into the 1970s. In 1954 they set up Brother International (U.S.A.) in California to sell exported machines directly, laying the first thread of the overseas network on which the company still runs.

A restless redeployment of the same skills carried Brother out of sewing machines. In 1961, at the request of its US sales arm, it began building portable typewriters for an American office market that welcomed cheap, capable Japanese machines — the seed of its office-equipment business. In 1962 it renamed itself Brother Industries and, spinning off the tapping machines it had built in-house for its own production lines, began selling machine tools as a business in their own right; in January 1963 it listed on the Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka exchanges.

The core kept migrating. Electronic calculators followed in 1966, and in 1971 Brother began OEM production of a high-speed dot printer for America’s Centronics — the pivot from typewriters to printers that seeded today’s P&S (printing and solutions) business. By fiscal 1983 office machines were 39.3% of sales against sewing machines’ 27.9%: seventy-five years in, the founding trade had been overtaken by the office typewriter. As US trade friction over typewriter exports bit and the yen climbed, Brother built typewriter plants in the UK (1985) and the US (1986) and had moved household-machine production to Taiwan from 1978 to blunt currency risk.

Then it began assembling the pieces of what it is now: thermal-fax OEM supply and its first own-controller monochrome laser printer in 1987, and the P-Touch label printer in 1988 — each a fresh transfer of sewing-machine-era precision into a new domain.

In February 1989 Yoshihiro Yasui, a grandson of the founding family, became the eighth president and set up a “21st Century Committee” of age-banded teams to argue what Brother should become; the thirties team’s answer, close to creative destruction, was to quit appliances and concentrate on information equipment. He chose that path. The transformation was built on a run of failures — a software vending machine (“Takeru”) and a colour copier both flopped, leaving only fax, which as a latecomer could sell at first only as an OEM supply.

What made the shift possible was a refusal to punish failure and a habit of growing new businesses under the president’s own wing, turning each defeat into the seed of the next product. Brother nearly retreated from office equipment before its image-systems division rescued it in 1992 with the FAX-600: against a US mainstream price of $799, market research found demand at the low end, so Brother designed backward from $399 and reached volume through contract production in Shenzhen. It swept the US fax market, and led on to a small laser multifunction machine — fax, printer, copier and scanner in one — in 1995 and a colour inkjet MFP in 1997.

The reinvention also meant clearing an old structural debt. In April 1999 Brother rescued and fully absorbed its long-separate sales company, ending a manufacturing/sales split that had run since 1941 — but inheriting some $557.8M (¥64bn) of its interest-bearing debt. Governance reforms followed in 2000, and under the 2002 “Global Vision 21” (a $8.0B (¥1tn) sales goal) a booming SOHO inkjet business in America drove Brother to its highest profit in nineteen years in fiscal 2003, finally shedding the “products made by a sewing-machine company” label.

Under Toshikazu Koike, president for eleven years from 2007, Brother settled into a self-description — a “Japan-born global maker of small precision machines” — and spread production beyond China into Vietnam and beyond; in 2006 it even shifted its stock classification from machinery to electrical equipment to match what it had become. But its main line, the home printer, faced a maturing market, and the old reflex asserted itself: secure the next pillar before the current one fades.

In 2015 Brother made the largest acquisition in its history, buying the British industrial-printing maker Domino Printing Sciences for $1.6B (¥193bn) — a European food-packaging printer earning roughly 20% operating margins — as a hedge against the decline of the home-printer market and the promised route to the Global Vision 21 goal. The bet did not pay as modelled: under Ichiro Sasaki, president from 2018, Brother wrote down $247.8M (¥27bn) of Domino’s $679.5M (¥75bn) goodwill in fiscal 2020, as business cycles and currency swings kept it short of plan. The pandemic then swung the other way, lifting home-printer demand on remote work even as commercial multifunction machines, industrial sewing machines and Domino slumped.

The company has spent the years since restructuring around that lesson. It fully absorbed the industrial-parts maker Nissei in 2022, moved to the Prime Market, and launched the “At your side 2030” vision — shifting its main force from single consumer printers to the whole P&S business of commercial multifunction machines, scanners and label printers. In 2024 Kazufumi Ikeda, a fourth straight president raised in the US operations, took over; fiscal 2025 brought the highest results in Brother’s history and, that December, machine-tool production began in India. Brother enters its next plan stronger than ever — with the standing task of binding a portfolio widened by acquisition back into a single, durable base of earnings.