HORIBA Brand Guidelines: A 1945 Kyoto Radio Lab, the MEXA Analyser & “Joy and Fun”

A Kyoto student’s workshop, 1945.

HORIBA began in Kyoto in the autumn of 1945. The company gives its founding date as 17 October 1945, when, by its own history, the HORIBA RADIO LABORATORY was established. Its founder was Masao Horiba. When he received the Pittcon Heritage Award in 2006, the chromatography journal LCGC reported that he had founded the laboratory while still a physics student at Kyoto Imperial University, at the end of the Second World War, and soon developed what the journal called Japan’s first electrode-type pH meter. English Wikipedia says he graduated in nuclear physics from Kyoto University.

The pH meter shaped the company. HORIBA’s history dates its first glass-electrode pH meter to March 1950 and calls it a key product of the early years. LCGC wrote that the pH meter led to the establishment of HORIBA, Ltd. in 1953; the company gives the incorporation date as 26 January 1953. Both years often quoted for the company are therefore right: 1945 for the laboratory, 1953 for the company. A year after incorporation, LCGC reported, Horiba began research on infrared measurement for gas analysis, which he went on to apply to instruments for air pollution and vehicle exhaust.

In November 1959 HORIBA formed a business and technical alliance with Hitachi, the company says; English Wikipedia records that Hitachi was a principal shareholder from 1959 until 2002. The shares were listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange and the Kyoto Stock Exchange in March 1971 and on the first sections of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges in 1982, by the company’s own history; today it lists them on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Its head office remains in Kyoto, and its chairman and group chief executive is Atsushi Horiba, who became president in January 1992, the company says.

From exhaust gas to Raman.

Exhaust measurement runs through HORIBA’s history. The company dates its first automotive emission analyser, the MEXA-1, to 1964, and calls the MEXA-200 carbon-monoxide analyser of 1969 a major hit in its history; in 1975, it says, the United States Environmental Protection Agency adopted MEXA. The name continues in the MEXA-ONE, released in 2012. Water is another long line: the company sells water-quality analysers under the LAQUA name, introduced in 2011, and says it began selling an early cordless pH meter in 1993.

Much of the group came by acquisition. In June 1996 HORIBA bought ABX, a French maker of blood-cell counters, from Hoffmann-La Roche; in September 1997 it bought the French optical-instrument maker Jobin Yvon; and in 2005 it acquired Schenck’s development test systems business in Germany, according to both the company and English Wikipedia. In July 2015 it acquired MIRA, the British vehicle engineering and testing company, now HORIBA MIRA, the company says. Later additions included MedTest Holdings in 2021, Tethys Instruments of France in 2023 and the American firm Process Instruments in 2023, by the company’s account.

In spectroscopy, the company launched the LabRAM Soleil Raman microscope in 2020 and, the same year, began working with Shimadzu on LC-Raman instruments; the jointly developed system went on sale in 2021, it says. In December 2020 it announced that its X-ray fluorescence analysers would be used to analyse samples that the Hayabusa2 probe had collected from the asteroid Ryugu.

Today HORIBA describes three business fields — Energy & Environment, Bio & Healthcare and Materials & Semiconductor. Its semiconductor side includes mass flow controllers from HORIBA STEC, which the company says made its first mass flow controller in 1980, and English Wikipedia says its medical business, headquartered in Montpellier, grew from ABX.

Design and documentation.

Laboratory instrument makers tend to present themselves through the laboratory itself. Their pictures are usually of benchtop instruments in bright white rooms: chromatographs, spectrometers and titrators lined up on long benches, with sample trays loaded and a screen beside each one showing a chromatogram’s peaks or the curve of a spectrum. The instrument is often shown with its door open or a vial in a gloved hand, so that the scale of the work is clear.

People appear in a familiar costume. Scientists in white coats, safety glasses and nitrile gloves lean over a pipette, check a result on a monitor or load a rack of samples, and the setting is usually a clean, well-lit room rather than a factory floor. Lab automation brings its own imagery: pipetting robots moving across a deck of microplates, grippers lifting a plate from one station to the next, and close-ups of tips, tubes and wells.

The same settings recur across the category: product photographs on plain white or pale grey backgrounds, cut-away diagrams of an instrument’s inner path, and data shown as it would appear on the screen — a set of peaks, a spectral curve, a titration curve or a grid of wells coloured by result. In this kind of picture the instrument, the sample and the data carry the message, and a maker’s name usually appears as a badge on the casing or a logo in the corner.

Trade fairs remain central to how the industry shows itself. Exhibitions such as analytica in Munich, Pittcon in the United States and ACHEMA in Frankfurt bring instrument makers together on large stands, where new instruments are launched and demonstrated. The guides that follow look at what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and how its name has changed — and keep the company’s own claims separate from what independent sources record.

“Joy and Fun.”

HORIBA writes about its own identity directly. The company says that in 1988 it launched initiatives to establish a “HORIBA Identity,” which it calls the first step in creating the HORIBA brand, and that in 2004 it renamed its subsidiaries to carry the HORIBA name under the policy “HORIBA Group is One Company.” So ABX became HORIBA ABX, and Jobin Yvon became HORIBA Jobin Yvon, as English Wikipedia records. The name is set in capitals throughout the company’s own materials.

Its motto is “Joy and Fun,” in Japanese “Omoshiro Okashiku,” adopted in 1978 by the company’s account; LCGC cited the same policy in 2006. The company explains it as a wish for employees to find their work rewarding, and it calls the people of the group “HORIBARIANs.” In 2003, to mark fifty years in business, it created a research grant in the founder’s name, now the Masao Horiba Awards, for researchers working on analysis and measurement.

Its footprint is international. The company lists business locations across Japan and operations in about twenty countries, among them Austria, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. Its history records factories at Aso in Kumamoto prefecture and in Shanghai, an expanded plant for gas and air-pollution analysers at Leichlingen in Germany, and a European research centre opened near Paris in 2012.

For a design guide, HORIBA shows how a founder’s surname, set in capitals, can become one brand across many acquired companies. Compare Shimadzu, its LC-Raman partner, and JEOL, another Japanese maker of scientific instruments. For this guide we use a deep blue and a warm gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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