It started with sewing-machine repair: how Brother branched into ¥893.5 billion.
Brother generated ¥893.5bn of sales revenue and ¥77.9bn of operating profit in FY2025. Printing & Solutions was the largest business at ¥570.6bn, alongside Industrial Printing at ¥139.3bn, Machinery at ¥83.0bn and Personal & Home at ¥61.0bn. The company began as a sewing-machine repair business in 1908 and achieved domestic mass production of home sewing machines in 1932. Press-forming and precision-processing technologies developed through sewing-machine manufacturing moved into typewriters and other products, while motors and electronics enabled further diversification. In 1962, Brother used in-house technologies for sewing-machine processing to enter machine tools. In 1971, it began shipping a high-speed dot-matrix printer, leading to electronic-control and print-head technologies later used in fax machines and printers. Brother did not simply abandon sewing machines for printers; technologies built to master one machine repeatedly became the seeds of the next business.