Brussels – SATO, a leader in barcode printing and Meckelborg, a specialist in product coding and marking have announced today their 40th anniversary of cooperation. Patrick Frimat, SATO's Managing Director for Europe says: ”We are delighted about this long-lasting and mutually beneficial partnership with our biggest Business Partner in the Nordic countries and we look forward to developing further projects together with Meckelborg.”

Meckelborg, founded by Mr E-O Meckelborg, started its business by selling SATO manufactured handlabeller to the Finnish retail sector in 1965. Automatic labelling started in the 1970's and the next big milestone in this fruitful cooperation was when Meckelborg sold the first thermal transfer printer, the M2700 EAN-printer to a department store in Finland . Meckelborg continued to operate in the retail sector by selling two models from SATO, the M2700 and M3360/3380 to the retailers and bakeries.

The industrial printers started to come in the picture in the late 1980's with the thermal transfer printer model M4500 and with SATO's record breaking print module M4600S. Since then thousands of SATO printers have been delivered by Meckelborg to different industries across Finland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Today, the SATO printers are mainly used in the industry, but also in the logistics sector. In 2004, Meckelborg and Kesko , Finland 's leading provider of services in the Finnish trading sector, made an agreement of delivering over 60 units of SATO M-84Pro thermal printers and consumables to Kesko's 5 logistics centre around Finland.

Robert Plyhm, Meckelborg's Managing Director states: “With coding & marking being the core-business of Meckelborg, with its own label converting and Ventus print & apply machines, the cooperation with SATO is very natural. Both companies are working on the same field 100 % which also helps the development. For the future the RFID technology will definitely be a common interest for both companies in desktop and print & apply applications. So another 40 years of cooperation should not be a problem.”

About Meckelborg
Meckelborg Oy has been working in the product coding and marking already since 1965. Together with main product suppliers Meckelborg can cover the needs of the industrial field of product marking and barcoding. Total-service business philosophy is strengthened by company's own label production facilities with both flexo and offset printing technologies for labels in different shapes and materials in multicolour or blanks. Meckelborg's R&D has given rise to the Ventus Print & Apply automatic labelling systems, which has been widely represented in Europe since 1997. Today the Meckelborg group has 50 employees and a turnover of 10 million € with companies in Norway and Sweden. More information can be found at www.meckelborg.fi

Contact:
SATO
Susanne Wahler
Leuvensesteenweg 369
1932 Sint-Stevens-Woluwe – Brussels, Belgium
Tel: +32 (0)2 788 80 00, Fax: +32 (0)2 788 80 80
E-mail: [email protected]

Meckelborg
Virpi Uuttera
Tinankuja 3
FIN-02430 MASALA
Tel +358 (0)10 400 1360
Fax +358 (0)10 400 1350
E-mail: [email protected]