SATO was founded in 1940 to develop, manufacture and sell machinery for processing bamboo, rattan and palm. Throughout its history, the company has been obsessed with meeting demands for labour efficiency. In 1962, SATO founder Yo Sato invented a hand labeller. The company subsequently became a pioneer in price marking, and was able to open up new markets when the hand labeller became a smash hit around the world. In 1964, SATO began independently manufacturing hand labellers, moving beyond the machine manufacturer paradigm to build the foundations of a supply business. With the emergence of point-of-sale (POS) systems in the 1970s, SATO developed new hand labeller models that were compatible with optical character recognition (OCR) and barcodes. In 1981, the Company emerged as the leading manufacturer of in-store marking solutions when it invented the world's first thermal transfer printer for JAN/UPC/EAN POS systems.