BIXOLON Brand Guidelines: The Samsung Printer Spin-Off of 2002, Now Part of IDIS

A printer-mechanism line that became a company.

BIXOLON’s story starts inside Samsung. The company says it began in 1993, when Samsung Electro-Mechanics started producing printing mechanisms for electronic cash registers, and that the business moved into POS printers in 1998 and barcode printers in 2002. That year it was spun off as a company of its own. Korean Wikipedia gives the founding date as 14 November 2002 and describes BIXOLON as separated from Samsung Electro-Mechanics’ EPOS printer division.

The Samsung link stayed visible for years. In a buyer’s-guide profile published by VARinsights in May 2007, the company described itself as having “originated from Samsung” and listed its range as the “BIXOLON Samsung” product line, from thermal receipt printers such as the SRP-350, which it said had launched in 2000, to impact and inkjet receipt printers and the SPP-R200 mobile printer. The same profile placed its headquarters in Korea, branch offices in Carson, California and Düsseldorf, a factory in Chungju for receipt and label printers, and another in Dongguan, China, for printer mechanisms. It said then that it had more than 200 employees working on POS printers and operations in more than 60 countries. The SPP-R200, it said, could take an optional Bluetooth card and a built-in magnetic card reader, so that a card could be processed where the sale took place.

The company’s own timeline adds that it set up a domestic production company, Everint, and gained ISO 9001 certification in 2005, and opened a production plant in Chungju in 2008. Korean Wikipedia says BIXOLON’s shares were listed on 20 August 2007; MarketScreener lists it on KOSDAQ.

The name is its own invention. BIXOLON says it joins “Business” with Solon, counted among the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, whose name the company uses as shorthand for wisdom; it also offers the readings “Be-So-Long” and “Big Solon.” The company writes the name in capitals throughout.

Counters, belts and kiosks.

BIXOLON’s range covers the places where small printers do their work. Its Korean website groups products as mobile printers, POS printers, label printers, RFID, linerless printers, and kiosk printers and mechanisms, alongside mobile computers, supplies and software. The receipt printer at a shop counter, the label printer in a back room or warehouse, and the handheld printer clipped to a delivery driver’s belt all sit in the same catalogue.

Industrial labelling came later than the receipt business. In February 2022 BIXOLON launched the XT3-40, a four-inch direct thermal and thermal transfer industrial label printer, alongside its existing XT5-40 industrial series; in the announcement, carried by MarketScreener, its managing director for Europe said the XT3-40 had been awarded the Good Design award.

The kiosk side has drawn attention too. In April 2026 IT Supply Chain reported that BIXOLON’s BK3-31, an open-frame 80 mm thermal printer built into self-checkout machines and kiosks, had been named “Self Checkout Solution of the Year” in the fourth RetailTech Breakthrough Awards.

The company has spread its sales network well beyond Korea. Its website lists subsidiaries for the Americas in Torrance, California, and in Mexico City, BIXOLON Europe in Düsseldorf, an office for the Middle East and Africa in Dubai, and contacts in Russia and Türkiye, and its chief executive, Noh Hyun-chul, writes on the site that the company has set up local subsidiaries in the United States and Europe to stay close to customers. Repairs in Korea are handled from an after-sales centre at the Everint building in Chungju, the website says.

Labels, receipts and the trade.

Label and receipt printers are rarely noticed by the people who use their output. A shipping label on a parcel, a price tag on a shelf, a wristband, a till receipt or a ticket from a self-checkout machine all come from small thermal printers that sit out of sight, and the companies that make them present themselves less as consumer brands than as suppliers to warehouses, shops, hospitals and factories.

Their catalogues follow the places where the printers work. Desktop label printers sit on packing benches and in back offices; larger industrial models run around the clock on distribution lines and print-and-apply systems; receipt printers sit at shop counters and inside kiosks; and handheld printers hang from belts and shoulder straps in delivery vans and store aisles. Alongside the machines, most makers sell the consumables that keep them running, from label rolls and wristbands to thermal transfer ribbons, as well as software for managing whole fleets of printers.

The trade meets at fairs rather than in shop windows. Makers show new models at events such as LogiMAT in Stuttgart for warehousing and logistics, the NRF retail show in New York, and EuroShop in Düsseldorf for retail equipment, where printers appear alongside scanners, mobile computers and RFID readers. Product names are mostly codes of letters and numbers, as in the ranges described in this guide.

Many of the makers have changed hands, merged or grown out of larger electronics groups, so their names often carry traces of earlier owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — where it began, who owns it now and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Samsung to the IDIS group.

The ownership changed in 2017. According to MarketScreener, IDIS Holdings signed an agreement on 31 October 2017 to buy a 40.7% stake in BIXOLON from its existing shareholders, and the deal was completed on 19 December 2017, the date of the extraordinary shareholders’ meeting that approved new directors. Korean Wikipedia, citing BIXOLON’s 2024 annual report, says IDIS Holdings and one related party hold 41.8% of the shares, and describes BIXOLON as the IDIS group’s industrial printer company.

BIXOLON now sits inside that group in a literal sense: the company gives its headquarters as the IDIS Tower in the Pangyo district of Seongnam, and lists IDIS among its sister companies. Its timeline records the move into the group as a milestone of its own, after the 2005 production company and the 2008 Chungju plant.

Its news releases describe BIXOLON as a global manufacturer of printing technologies for receipts, labels, auto-ID and mobile printing, and its regional websites for Europe and the Americas carry the same name and the same capitalised wordmark. The Samsung connection that the 2007 product line carried in its name now appears in the history on the company’s Korean website.

For a design guide, BIXOLON shows how a business born as a division of a large electronics group can build a separate name, with an invented word that carries its own small story, while keeping its products plain and functional. Compare Epson, another maker of receipt printers, and TSC Printronix Auto ID, the Taiwanese label-printer group that also owns the mobile-computer maker Bluebird. For this guide we use a navy, a receipt white and an orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep BIXOLON’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.