AstroNova Profile
AstroNova, Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries (AstroNova) design, develop, manufacture, and distribute a broad range of specialty printers and data acquisition and analysis systems, including both hardware and software, which incorporate advanced technologies to acquire, store, analyze, and present data in multiple formats. Target markets for the company's hardware and software products include aerospace, apparel, automotive, avionics, chemicals, computer peripherals, communications, distribution, food and beverage, general manufacturing, packaging and transportation.
The company's products are distributed worldwide through the company's own sales force, authorized dealers, and independent dealers and representatives.
The company's business consists of two segments, Product Identification ('PI') and Test & Measurement ('T&M'). The PI segment includes specialty printing systems and related supplies sold under the QuickLabel, TrojanLabel and GetLabels brand names. The T&M segment includes the company's line of aerospace printers, ethernet networking products and test and measurement data acquisition systems sold under the AstroNova brand name.
On August 4, 2022, the company acquired Astro Machine LLC ('Astro Machine'), an Illinois-based manufacturer of printing equipment, including label printers and related accessories, tabbers, conveyors, and envelope feeders. Astro Machine is reported as a part of the company's PI segment beginning with the third quarter of fiscal 2023 (the year ended January 31, 2023).
Product Overview
The company leverages its expertise in data visualization technologies to design, manufacture and market specialty printing systems, test and measurement systems, and related services for select growing markets globally.
PI products sold under the QuickLabel, TrojanLabel and GetLabels brands are used in brand owner and commercial applications to provide product packaging, marketing, tracking, branding, and labeling solutions to a wide array of industries. The PI segment offers a variety of digital color label tabletop printers and light commercial label printers, direct-to-package printers, high-volume presses, and specialty original equipment manufacturer ('OEM') printing systems, as well as a wide range of label, tag and flexible packaging material substrates and other supplies, including ink and toner, allowing customers to mark, track, protect and enhance the appearance of their products. PI products sold under the Astro Machine brand acquired on August 4, 2022, also include a variety of label printers, envelope and packaging printing, and related processing and handling equipment. In the T&M segment, the company has a long history of using the company's technologies to provide networking systems and high-resolution flight deck and cabin printers for the aerospace market. In addition, the T&M segment includes data acquisition recorders, sold under the AstroNova brand, to enable the company's customers to acquire and record visual and electronic signal data from local and networked data streams and sensors. The recorded data is processed, analyzed, stored and presented in various visual output formats.
Product Identification
The company's PI segment includes three brands: QuickLabel, TrojanLabel, and GetLabels. Additionally, PI includes the recently acquired Astro Machine brand that is sold directly to end users though the company's channel partners and to OEM customers, who generally rebrand these products for sales to their customers. The segment provides a wide array of digital end-to-end product marking and identification solutions, including hardware, software, and supplies for OEMs, commercial printers, and brand owners. The company's customers typically label or mark products on a short- to mid-size run basis and benefit from the efficiency, flexibility, and cost-savings of digitally printing labels or packaging in their facility, on-demand, with the ability to accommodate multiple SKUs or variable data, such as bar codes, lot numbers or expiration dates. QuickLabel brand products include tabletop printers, production-ready digital color label printers, and specialty OEM printing systems for either standalone output or inline integration with existing pre-processing and finishing systems. Customers use the company's digital printing products in a wide variety of industries, including chemicals, cosmetics, food and beverage, medical products, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, and many others. TrojanLabel expands the company's customer market by providing a range of higher volume digital color printers, OEM printing systems, and supplies that target the more demanding needs of brand owners, commercial printers, label converters, and packaging manufacturers, giving them the ability to digitally mark or encode products directly or to produce labels for post-printing applications. GetLabels brand products include a full line of media supplies, including label materials, tags, inks, toners, and thermal transfer ribbons designed for optimal performance with the company's printing hardware, and are also compatible with a wide variety of competitive and third-party printing hardware.
QuickLabel models include a selection of professional tabletop digital color label printers. The company recently introduced the QL-E100, an entry-level, compact, full-color tabletop label printer. It delivers professional-quality output at a lower price point, which is ideal for targeting smaller businesses entering the on-demand label market, and larger enterprises that require multiple on-demand label printers at distributed locations throughout their facilities. The high-speed QL-120X was built on the company's pioneering and successful Kiaro! platform. To expand the product line further, the QL-120Xe, a sister product to the dye ink QL-120X, was introduced in 2021 as a lower price point option for low-volume applications and price-sensitive customers. In 2020, the company introduced the QL-120D, which features high-performance pigment inks that can produce durable BS5609-certified labels and labels that can withstand a wide range of demanding environmental conditions from sterilization to cryogenic freezing. Introduced early in 2019, the high-performance QL-300 was the first 5-color toner-based electrophotographic tabletop production label printer in the market. In addition, the company's QuickLabel line of printers includes the QL-850, the company's next-generation wide-format inkjet color label printer, the QL-30 and QL-60 series, a family of high-end monochrome printers, and the QLS-4100 XE, a unique solution with the ability to digitally print full-color labels and tags using thermal transfer ribbon technology.
The company's TrojanLabel portfolio includes a range of products from professional digital color label mini-presses to large-scale all-in-one inline specialty printing systems for both brand owners, OEMs, and commercial printers. The T2-C, a compact, digital mini-press designed for 24/7 label production, includes numerous differentiating features for several end-use market applications. The T2-L is a narrow-format digital press designed specifically for flexible packaging substrates. Beyond label printing, the T3-OPX, the first of its kind direct-to-package printer, which was introduced in late 2020, allows printing directly onto a range of flat products, including cardboard, paper bags, flat wood planks and many other items using pigment inks that are resistant to both water and UV exposure. A professional high-volume label press and finishing system, the T4, enables print, die-cut, and lamination in an all-in-one machine with a much smaller footprint than others in the market.
GetLabels provides a broad range of high-quality supplies for both the company's printers and third-party printers, including label and tag materials, inks, toner, and thermal transfer material, all specifically designed and constructed for a wide variety of labeling applications. Label material and substrates are carefully qualified and tested on-site in the company's Rhode Island Materials Research Laboratory to ensure durability and compatibility with the company's QuickLabel and TrojanLabel branded products, along with a variety of third-party printers.
Astro Machine sells a variety of label printers, envelope and package printers and related envelope tabbers, conveyors and feeders to OEM customers who re-label the products with their own brand.
The PI segment provides worldwide training and support, as well as develops and licenses various specialized software programs to design and manage labels, print images, manage and operate the company's printers and presses, and coordinate printing on an automated basis directly over networked systems.
Test & Measurement
Products sold under the company's T&M segment are designed and manufactured for airborne printing and networking solutions and data acquisition. The company's aerospace products include flight deck printing solutions, networking hardware and specialized aerospace-grade thermal paper. The company's data acquisition systems are used in research and development, flight testing, missile/rocket telemetry production monitoring, power and maintenance applications. These products are sold to customers in various industries, including aerospace & defense, automotive, commercial airline, energy, manufacturing and transportation, to meet their need to acquire and record data from local and networked data streams and sensors.
The company's airborne printers, which include the company's flagship ToughWriter series, are used in the flight decks and cabins of military, commercial, and business aircraft to print hard copies of data to enhance flight safety and reduce pilot workload by providing ready access to many types of critical flight-specific information required for the safe and efficient operation of aircraft. Examples of printed data include navigation maps, arrival and departure information, flight itineraries, weather maps, notice to air missions or NOTAMS, performance data, passenger data, and air traffic control data. ToughSwitch Ethernet switches are used primarily in military aircraft and military vehicles to connect multiple computers or Ethernet devices. The airborne printers and Ethernet switches are ruggedized to comply with rigorous military and commercial flight-worthiness standards for operation under extreme environmental conditions. The company is furnishing ToughWriter printers for various aircraft made by Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, Lockheed, Gulfstream, and others. In addition to the ToughWriter products, the company furnishes other acquired flight deck printer products, including the TP/NP series, the RTP80 series and the PTA-45B series of airborne printers. The PTA-45B is subject to the Asset Purchase and License Agreement with Honeywell International, Inc. (the 'Honeywell Agreement'), pursuant to which in 2017 the company acquired an exclusive perpetual worldwide license to manufacture and support Honeywell's narrow-format flight deck printers for the Boeing 737 and Airbus 320 aircraft. Over time the company expects customers to replace the PTA-45B and other acquired printer product lines with the AstroNova designed ToughWriter products because of the numerous technical features, functional advantages and significant weight savings. Approximately one-third of the airborne printers sold are ToughWriter branded, and the company expects the percentage of ToughWriter products to continue to grow over the next several years, and notably in fiscal 2025.
Other T&M products include the TMX all-in-one high-speed data acquisition system for applications requiring high channel counts and acquisition rates; the Daxus DXS-100 distributed data acquisition platform; the SmartCorder DDX-100, a portable all-in-one data acquisition system for R&D facility and field testing; and the Everest EV-5000 digital strip chart recording system used mainly in aerospace and defense applications. The Daxus DXS-100 can be connected to the SmartCorder to increase channel count or networked as part of a distributed measurement system spanning vast distances.
Marketing
Through the company's existing network of manufacturing, sales and support facilities, the company has sold its products to customers in over 150 countries.
The company is a market leader in tabletop digital color label printing technology in the specialty on-demand printing field, the market leader in flight deck printers, and an innovator in digital color mini-press systems. In the data acquisition area, the company is one of the leaders in general-purpose, portable, high-speed data acquisition systems.
The company's PI products are sold by direct field salespersons, as well as independent dealers and representatives, while the company's T & M products are sold predominantly through direct sales and manufacturers' representatives. In the United States, the company has factory-trained direct-field salespeople located throughout the country specializing in PI products. The company also has direct field sales or service centers in Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, and the United Kingdom staffed by the company's own employees and dedicated third-party contractors. Additionally, the company utilizes over 100 independent dealers and representatives selling and marketing the company's products in over 60 countries.
Government Regulation
Other applicable and potentially applicable regulations and laws include regulations and laws regarding taxation, accounting and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ('SEC') reporting, privacy, data protection, pricing, content, distribution, energy consumption, environmental regulation, competition, consumer protection, employment, import and export matters, information reporting requirements, access to the company's services and facilities, the design and operation of websites, health, safety, and sanitation standards, the characteristics and quality of products and services, product labeling and unfair and deceptive trade practices.
The company's business outside of the U.S. exposes the company to foreign and additional U.S. laws and regulations, including but not limited to, laws and regulations relating to taxation, business licensing or certification requirements, consumer protection, intellectual property rights, consumer and data protection, privacy, encryption, restrictions on pricing or discounts, and the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other applicable U.S. and foreign laws prohibiting corrupt payments to government officials and other third parties.
Research and Development
The company's research and development costs $6.8 million for the year ended January 31, 2023.
History
AstroNova, Inc. was founded in 1969. The company was incorporated in 1969.
