From Offset Presses to Printed Electronics: Komori's Industrial Pivot

Printing's largest equipment makers are quietly becoming technology conglomerates. Komori's first-quarter results for fiscal 2027 show why: revenue of 23.1 billion yen, up 2.5 percent year on year, operating income of 537 million yen, and orders of 33.2 billion yen above internal forecasts. Sheetfed offset press orders rose 46 percent, and international markets now contribute more than 70 percent of revenue, with Europe up 41 percent and Greater China up 74 percent. The traditional press business is not shrinking — but it is no longer the whole story.

Four Divisions, One Technology Core

Komori's operations now span four divisions built on the same imaging and transport know-how. Offset printing remains the anchor, serving commercial, publishing, and packaging printers. Security printing supplies presses for banknotes, passports, and secure documents to more than thirty countries. Digital printing systems target variable-data, short-run, and personalized work. The fourth division — printed electronics — is where the growth narrative lives.

Printing Circuits Instead of Pages

Printed electronics applies printing processes to the manufacture of electronic circuits, components, micro-LEDs, RFID antennas, perovskite photovoltaic cells, and interconnects for the semiconductor industry, driven mainly through the Seria Corporation subsidiary. Instead of etching silicon, functional inks are deposited in precise patterns on flexible substrates. The economics differ from conventional packaging printing: higher value per square meter, demanding registration, and customers in electronics rather than retail.

Diversification in Action

The announced acquisition of Maruyama Chiller Corporation — a maker of cooling equipment for semiconductor production — shows the strategy's direction. It adds manufacturing capacity, opens a customer base among electronic component makers, and gradually reduces reliance on investment cycles from printers. The logic is the same across the industry: companies that built presses are now selling precision manufacturing platforms.

What It Signals for Print Buyers

For print buyers, the practical consequence is reassuring. Equipment suppliers are healthier and less cyclical, which supports continued investment in the press technology that commercial and packaging printing rely on. The same engineering that makes a reliable sheetfed press is being applied to entirely new substrates and products — proof that print's core competency, precise deposition of material at speed, has value far beyond paper.