SIIX Brand Guidelines: Sakata Inx’s 1957 Export Desk Turned Osaka Circuit-Board Maker

“Inki” and “denki.”

SIIX did not start as an electronics company. Its own history traces the business to 1957, when an export section was set up in the trading division of Sakata Shokai, the Osaka printing-ink maker now called Sakata Inx, and began shipping Japanese electronic components to the Philippines. Japanese Wikipedia gives the same origin: an overseas department of a large ink maker whose first business was exporting parts to the Philippines.

The company credits that start to Shiro Murai, a Sakata employee who, it says, began handling electronic components on his own as a new business inside the ink maker. In the founder’s account on the SIIX website, he made a 40-day trip around Southeast Asia in the spring of 1957 and found Philippine television plants assembling sets from imported parts. He answered colleagues who asked why an ink company should sell components with a pun: in Japanese, ink (inki) and electricity (denki) differ by one sound. SIIX says Sakata won the right to sell Matsushita’s electronic components in the Philippines in 1959.

The export desk widened over the following decades. By the company’s timeline it opened offices in Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Sydney, Taiwan, Los Angeles and Singapore between 1960 and 1972; made and exported electronic organs for others from 1970, including through a joint company with the American organ maker Hammond; produced motorcycles jointly with Kawasaki Heavy Industries from 1974; and exported CRT monitors under the SAKATA brand from 1982. Its move into manufacturing came through Southeast Asia: in 1979 a joint venture in Singapore began mounting circuit boards, and in 1988 board mounting started in Thailand, at what the company now calls its flagship factory.

Sakata InX International, plus an X.

In July 1992 Sakata Inx spun off its overseas business department as a wholly owned company, Sakata Inx International, with its head office in Osaka; the company gives its date of incorporation as 1 July 1992. In July 1998 it was renamed SIIX. The company explains the name as the initials of Sakata InX International with an extra X added “to represent infinite possibilities,” and its overseas subsidiaries took the new name at the same time.

Listing followed. SIIX joined the second section of the Osaka Securities Exchange in September 1999 and the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in November 2000, moved to the first sections of both in June 2005, and has been in the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime Market since April 2022, according to its history page; Japanese Wikipedia gives the same sequence. Sakata Inx remains its largest shareholder, the company’s overview says.

The factories spread through the 2000s and 2010s. The company lists a wholly owned plant on Batam in Indonesia from 1999; a joint-venture plant at Nitra in Slovakia from 2001, fully owned from 2005; Dongguan in China from 2002; its first EMS factory in Japan, at Sagamihara in Kanagawa, in 2010; Jakarta in 2010; Shanghai in 2012; Laguna in the Philippines in 2013; San Luis Potosí in Mexico, also in 2013; Hubei in China in 2017; and joint plants in China with the appliance maker Midea from 2015. A plant at Nagykőrös in Hungary, opened in 2016, closed in 2026, the company says.

Trade press has tracked it as a large contract assembler. In November 2011 Circuits Assembly reported that SIIX ranked tenth among EMS companies worldwide in the magazine’s Top 50, with plants in Japan, Thailand, Slovakia and China, and announced a business alliance with the North American contract assembler Ayrshire Electronics, in effect since that March, under which the two would share technical and physical resources; Murai, then chairman and CEO, was quoted on serving North American customers. SIIX itself says it is the largest EMS company in Japan and that circuit-board mounting is about 80 percent of its sales.

Design and documentation.

Contract electronics makers build products that carry other companies’ names, so the pictures they show of themselves tend to be about process rather than product. The most common image is a green circuit board moving along a conveyor line, often photographed at an angle so the rows of components catch the light. Close behind come pick-and-place machines caught in motion, their heads blurred as they set parts onto the board, and macro close-ups of solder joints, shiny and precise.

People appear too, usually as operators at inspection stations or assembly benches. Many wear blue or grey static-control smocks, with caps or gloves where the work calls for them, and the photographs stress tidy workstations, labelled bins and bright, even lighting. Clean-room scenes, with full gowns and soft white light, tend to go with medical or optical work.

Outside the factory, the imagery turns to buildings: low white or grey plants with large windows and a sign on the facade, photographed under a clear sky, often with a map of sites worldwide nearby. Trade fairs supply the rest. Stands at shows such as productronica in Munich and IPC APEX EXPO in the United States give these companies a public face, with demonstration lines, sample boards and banners in their corporate colours.

The names themselves are usually set in plain, sturdy sans-serifs, with one strong corporate colour, often a blue or a green, carrying the identity. The guides that follow look at how individual makers fit, or depart from, that common picture, and at what can be checked about who founded them, who owns them and where they build.

A “global business organizer.”

Cars now drive much of the business. The company says vehicle-related equipment accounts for more than half of its sales, and in February 2022 the Japanese trade publication AEI (Asia Electronics Industry) reported that president Koji Yanase expected dealings with electric-vehicle makers to grow, that SIIX had begun delivering mounted boards directly to car makers, and that it planned to raise its surface-mount lines from 166 across 12 production bases to 181. The same report said SIIX would enter semiconductor assembly and testing with partners and work with Sakata Inx on printed electronics, combining ink chemistry with circuit assembly. In February 2026 Circuits Assembly reported that the SIIX board had approved a business collaboration with Hagiya New Techno to share production capacity for automotive electronics in Japan’s Greater Kanto region.

Its self-description is less about factories than about connecting buyers and makers. SIIX calls itself a “Global Business Organizer,” a phrase it traces to Murai’s idea of matching “needs” and “seeds,” and it says it has about 50 bases in 14 countries. Its corporate statement includes a “concept of zero,” the idea that starting empty-handed need not stop a company from acting. The company names ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO/IEC 27001 among its certifications. Its head offices are in Osaka and Tokyo, with a sales department in Nagoya; in 2025 it set up a sales subsidiary in Bengaluru, India.

For a design guide, SIIX shows how a trading company’s plain initials can carry a manufacturing business that grew out of an ink maker’s export desk. Compare Venture Corporation, a contract manufacturer from Singapore, where SIIX opened an office in 1972, and Fabrinet, which also builds for other brands in Thailand. For this guide we use a navy and a circuit-board green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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