Citizen Celebrates 25th

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2010 marks the silver anniversary of Citizen Systems Europe, a leading manufacturer of high quality label, barcode and industrial printers. Since being established the company has grown to become a major supplier of reliable specialised printers, with an extensive network of European distributors providing value added application and support services.
 
Citizen Europe, as the company was then known, was founded 25 years ago in London as the sales and marketing arm for Citizen desktop dot matrix printers. The company then opened a factory in Scunthorpe, which was at one time the most efficient dot matrix facility anywhere in the world producing up to 40,000 printers each month. It was around this time that the company introduced the first laser printers onto the market, as well as the first dot matrix printers with multilingual LCD control panels.
 
With the shift in global manufacturing to the Far East in the 1990s, Citizen moved its production facilities to Japan and China, where they remain, to provide its customers with competitively priced technology. Following this stage in the company’s history, Citizen Systems Europe began to specialise in the label and barcode thermal printers for which it is best known for today.
 
Although high quality printers have always been at the centre of Citizen’s business, the company has also been known for developing other innovative technologies. For example, at one time it was the largest manufacturer in the world of floppy disk drives, supplying Compaq in Scotland with hundreds of thousands of units a month, and also produced hard drives for Hewlett Packard. Interestingly, Citizen was also producer of many of the original Compaq laptops and our knowledge of this was used in perhaps our most innovative development – a miniature laptop produced in collaboration with IBM, the PC110. Smaller than a hardback book or video cassette, this fully functional palm top laptop was ahead of its time when it was introduced over 15 years ago, and was the precursor for today’s compact PDA and Netbook devices.
 
The company is also one of the world’s leading manufacturers of crystals, used as the timing component in watches, microcomputers and PCs, and Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), as well as producing small Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) for some of the world’s biggest mobile phone brands. In addition, Citizen has developed and continues to sell a wide range of calculators from pocket and desktop to scientific models.
 
Today, Citizen operates across Europe through its network of value added resellers, providing customers in a wide range of industries with the very latest printing technology. Citizen Systems Europe is a wholly owned subsidiary of Citizen Systems Japan Co Ltd, which is itself a subsidiary of the world famous watch company, Citizen Holdings Co Ltd.