Sodick Brand Guidelines: The Yokohama Spark-Machine Maker That Moved Into Moulding

An engineer, a stubborn electrode and a company name built from three words.

Sodick is a machine-tool company first. It was built on electrical discharge machining, or EDM, which shapes hard metal with electrical sparks. Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun describes it as essential to mould making and to the electronics and car industries. Injection moulding machines came thirteen years after Sodick was founded.

Its founder, Toshihiko Furukawa, came from the same field. The Sodick history says he was working around 1960 for the Tokyo manufacturer later known as Japax, studying electrical theory at the same time. Nikkan Kogyo, the industrial daily, said on its Newswitch site in 2018 that he joined the predecessor of Japax in 1958. Both credit him with a circuit that stopped the electrode from wearing away, a step that widened what EDM could do; Sodick dates the discovery to 1963 and Nikkan Kogyo dates the development to 1965.

The two accounts differ a little on why he left. Sodick cites the downturn after the oil shock and differences over the direction of technical development. Nikkan Kogyo says he opposed a plan by the struggling parent to absorb the service business and went independent. Either way, in August 1976 he set up Sodick in Yokohama’s Midori Ward with 24 staff, the company says. Its outline gives the legal establishment as 3 August 1976 and adds “Founded: February 1971,” and its history refers to a predecessor called MEP.

Sodick says it delivered the world’s first microcomputer-equipped NC die-sinker EDM in December 1976, followed in March 1977 by the GPC power supply series. Nikkan Kogyo also credits it with achieving numerical control of EDM, which it says had been considered difficult because of the problem of controlling the electrode.

Expansion followed. The company listed in Tokyo in February 1986, Japanese Wikipedia says, and today trades on the Prime Market. It opened its Kaga plant in Ishikawa in March 1987 and a factory in Thailand in 1988.

A moulding machine designed by a mould maker’s supplier.

Sodick’s move into plastics grew out of a customer complaint. Its history says customers told it that precise moulds cut on Sodick EDMs were still giving unstable results because of defects arising on the moulding machines then available. In October 1989 the company announced that it was entering the business, and the following month it built a plant for injection moulding machines on the Kaga site.

Its answer was to separate two jobs that a conventional in-line machine does with a single screw. In what Sodick calls the V-LINE system, a registered trademark, a screw melts the resin and a plunger then injects a measured amount into the mould. Sodick says this removes the backflow it identified as the main cause of instability, and it pairs the method with a direct-pressure clamping mechanism that closes the mould in a straight line.

The early years were not easy by the company’s own account. Development took five years, and sales were difficult at first because few buyers knew the product. The moulding business was spun off in July 1992 as Sodick Plustech, which listed in August 2001 as the first Sodick subsidiary on a stock exchange. It was brought back into the parent in 2012: Japanese Wikipedia says Sodick made it a wholly owned subsidiary in March and absorbed it that July.

Today’s range is divided into horizontal, vertical and special-purpose machines. The horizontal line runs from small machines in the eV-LINE MS series and the GL series to the mid-size TR models, and includes thermosetting machines. The vertical line includes rotary models such as the VR03G. Special-purpose machines include the LMI450 for magnesium alloy. Sodick says its machines are used for automotive, electronics and medical parts, and that it shows small, large and vertical machines in its Kaga showroom.

The Kaga site, which Sodick calls its largest plant in Japan, is the centre of this work. A newer plant in Xiamen, China, began operating in January 2023 to build injection moulding machines and food machinery, the company says.

Machines as the message.

Injection moulding machine makers sell equipment that most people never see, so their visual language is built for a trade audience. The machine itself is usually the hero: a long horizontal body photographed side-on in factory light, often in a paint scheme the maker has kept for years. A colour on the guarding can do the work of a logo across a crowded production hall.

The second recurring picture is the open machine. Platens stand apart with a mould half showing, and a robot arm reaches in to lift a part from the tool. Close-ups of screws and barrels show the plasticising end of the process, where granulate becomes melt, and walls of moulded samples turn an abstract capability into objects a visitor can pick up: closures, housings, gears and containers. Where makers serve cleanroom production, the same machines appear inside enclosed, brightly lit cells.

Trade fairs give makers a place to show a machine running: K in Düsseldorf, Fakuma in Friedrichshafen, NPE in the United States and Chinaplas in Asia. Live moulding demonstrations make parts in front of visitors.

Behind the machines sits a quieter layer of typography and naming. Series names, short codes and clamping forces in kilonewtons carry much of the information, and controllers have become design objects in their own right, with screens and panels of their own. Many makers remain family-held or sit within larger groups, so names and marks can outlast changes of ownership, and the history is often part of the pitch.

A winged S, and a name made from a motto.

Sodick explains its own identity. The name, it says, combines the sounds of the Japanese words for “create” (sozo), “implement” (jikko) and “overcome difficulties” (kuro kokufuku). The founding spirit is still written out as “Create, Implement and Overcome Difficulties,” and the company’s current phrase is “Create Your Future.”

The logo has a stated meaning too. Sodick describes a central “S” framed by wings facing in two directions, which it says symbolise development toward the next generation and the company’s reach around the world.

The business is broader than either EDM or moulding. Sodick’s outline lists die-sinker, wire-cut and small-hole EDMs, machining centres, metal 3D printers, thermoplastic, thermosetting and magnesium injection moulding machines, engineering ceramics, linear motors, EDM wire and LED products. The company calls this reach a “Total Manufacturing Solution,” running from design and mould machining to finishing and moulding, and says it develops key parts such as NC units, linear motors and ceramics in-house.

Food is another line. Sodick makes continuous noodle-sheet pressing machines, noodle boiling and cooling equipment, and production systems for aseptically packed cooked rice. In 2019 a print advertisement for the rice system won a Silver Prize at the Business Advertising Awards run by Fuji Sankei Business i, according to the company’s awards page, which also lists the Best 10 New Product main awards from Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun for EDM models in 2018 and 2020.

Sodick says its products are made in Japan (Kaga, Fukui and Miyazaki), Thailand, China (Suzhou and Xiamen) and Italy (Turin). Sodick took a stake in 2024 in Prima Additive, a Turin maker of metal 3D printers, which 3D Printing Industry reported in 2025 had become a wholly owned subsidiary.

For a design guide, Sodick shows how a plain statement of meaning, in a name and a logo, can hold together a very wide product range. Compare Nissei Plastic, another Japanese maker of injection moulding machines, and Makino, a Japanese machine-tool name. For this guide we use graphite, a spark rust and a wire grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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