Sysmex Brand Guidelines: TOA Medical Electronics, a 1978 Coined Name & Kobe

A Kobe sales company of 1968.

Sysmex began in Kobe in February 1968 as TOA Medical Electronics. The company’s own history says it was set up to sell medical electronic equipment made by TOA Electric, with Taro Nakatani as its first president; a history published by Sysmex Europe adds that it started with eight employees. Japanese Wikipedia traces the work further back, to a research laboratory started in 1961 by Toa Tokushu Denki, the company now called TOA Corporation, and English Wikipedia describes TOA Medical Electronics as a branch of TOA Corporation.

Its first product, the company says, was CELLCHECK-B, a reference material holding a defined number of blood cells so that laboratories could check their counts, sold from April 1968. In 1972 it took over TOA Electric’s medical electronics division and opened an office in Hamburg, its first outside Japan; in 1973 it opened a factory at Kakogawa in Hyogo Prefecture. The company dates the CC-710, which it calls the first fully automated hematology analyser developed in Japan, to 1975, and an office in San Francisco to 1977.

In February 1978 the product brand changed from TOA to Sysmex. The company says the word was coined from “system,” “medical” and the letter X, standing for untapped potential, as it prepared to expand abroad. Subsidiaries followed in the United States in 1979 and in Germany in 1980, the German one being today’s Sysmex Europe, and in 1991 a British subsidiary began the company’s first direct sales overseas. The shares were listed in Osaka in 1995 and in Tokyo in 1996, according to Japanese Wikipedia, and in October 1998, the year of its 30th anniversary, the company took its brand as its name: Sysmex Corporation.

Blood counts, coagulation and urine.

Sysmex makes laboratory analysers and the reagents that run on them, and its history reads as a series of fields entered one at a time. The company dates its entry into urinalysis to the TU-100 of 1974, into blood coagulation to the CA-100 of 1984, into immunochemistry to the PAMIA-10 of 1987 and into urine sediment analysis to the UA-1000 of 1990. Hematology stayed at the centre, through the E-series of 1980, the NE-8000 of 1988 and the XE-2100 of 1999 to the XN-Series, launched in 2011. Japanese Wikipedia lists current families including the XN hematology analysers, the CS coagulation analysers, the UF urine analysers and the HISCL immunoassay systems.

Reagents are made in several countries. The company dates its first Japanese reagent factory, at Ono in Hyogo, to 1991; a reagent plant at Neumünster in Germany, built to supply Europe, to 1993; and a second reagent factory at Wuxi in China to 2003. Instruments came from Kakogawa and, from 1986, from a factory in the Seishin industrial park in Kobe’s Nishi ward, where the research centre Technopark opened in 2008. Japanese Wikipedia likewise names a research site in Nishi ward and a factory in Kakogawa.

Partnerships widened its reach. In 1995 Sysmex agreed a collaboration on coagulation products with Dade International, now Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, and in 1998 it signed a global alliance on marketing and research with F. Hoffmann-La Roche, the company says. In 2023 it took over Megakaryon, a university start-up working on platelets grown from iPS cells, Japanese Wikipedia says.

Design is part of the record. The Japan Institute of Design Promotion’s list of Good Design Gold Award winners for 2011 includes a Sysmex entry for its clinical laboratory system and its approach to designing it; the company says that system was built on a design concept it calls “Silent Design.” The company also lists a Good Design Award in 2003 for ASTRIM SU, a device for monitoring peripheral blood vessels.

How diagnostics companies present themselves.

In vitro diagnostics is a business most people meet only at second hand, through a blood sample sent away or a result read back by a doctor. The companies behind those results make analysers, the reagents that run on them and the software that ties them together, and they sell mainly to hospital laboratories, independent labs and clinics rather than to the public.

That shapes how they look. The typical product photograph shows a white or pale grey bench analyser in a clean laboratory, sometimes linked to others in a line of automation, with sample tubes standing in racks and a touchscreen at the front. Smaller formats appear too: single-use cartridges for point-of-care machines, test strips and cassettes for rapid tests, pipettes and reagent packs. Blue and white palettes are common across the sector, along with plain sans serif type and diagrams of the laboratory workflow, and some makers have had their instruments judged on design: Sysmex’s clinical laboratory system was among the Good Design Gold Award winners in Japan in 2011.

The trade meets at a few large events. MEDICA in Düsseldorf gathers medical technology makers, and the annual meeting of ADLM, the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine, formerly the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, brings laboratory companies together in the United States. Some of these groups grew by acquisition, so a single corporate name often sits above product names that began with other companies.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it, where its products are made and what it says about its own identity, and it marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. No diagnostic or clinical claims are made for any product.

An ocean, a mountain and a coined word.

The current corporate logo dates from October 2008, when the company redesigned it for its 40th anniversary. Sysmex describes the mark as two contrasting elements joined into one, a shape that recalls the infinity sign, with an ocean-and-mountain design meant to evoke the landscape of Kobe, where the company was born. The logotype, it says, uses a “solid but soft” typeface chosen to communicate friendliness. Its named colours are Sysmex Blue, the corporate colour, with a blue standing for the ocean and a green standing for the mountain.

The company is headquartered in Kobe’s Chuo ward. In 2025 it announced a move of its head office to a new development at Sannomiya, also in Kobe, planned for spring 2028, according to Japanese Wikipedia. Hisashi Ietsugu, appointed president in 1996, is chairman and group CEO, the company says. Its group philosophy, the “Sysmex Way,” dates from 2007, and its mission line is “Shaping the advancement of healthcare.”

Sysmex also puts its name on Kobe life. Japanese Wikipedia records that it took over a women’s track and field team in 2005, has been a special sponsor of the Kobe Marathon since the first race, and holds the naming rights to a skating rink, the Sysmex Kobe Ice Campus, from 2025 to 2030. The same article lists Medicaroid, a joint venture with Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and its hinotori surgical robot system.

For a design guide, Sysmex shows how a laboratory maker can build an identity from a coined product name and a hometown landscape. Compare Roche, its alliance partner since 1998, and Siemens Healthineers. For this guide we use a deep navy, a sea blue and a muted green on white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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