Yokogawa Electric

Yokogawa traces its roots back to 1915, when Dr. Tamisuke Yokogawa, a renowned architect, established an electric meter research institute in Shibuya, Tokyo. After pioneering the development and production of electric meters in Japan, this enterprise was incorporated in 1920 as Yokogawa Electric Works Ltd.

In 1933 Yokogawa began the research and manufacture of aircraft instruments and flow, temperature, and pressure controllers. In the years following the war, Yokogawa went public, developed its first electronic recorders, signed a technical assistance agreement for industrial instruments with the U.S. firm Foxboro, and opened its first overseas sales office (New York).

In the 1960s the company made a full-scale entry into the industrial analyzer market and launched the development, manufacturing, and sales of vortex flowmeters, and in the decade following established its first manufacturing plant outside Japan (Singapore), opened a sales office in Europe, and became one of the first companies to bring a distributed process control system to market. In 1983 Yokogawa merged with Hokushin Electric Works and, towards the end of the decade, entered the high-frequency measuring instrument business. In the 1990s, Yokogawa established an office in Bahrain to oversee its business in the Middle East and entered the confocal scanner and biotechnology businesses.

In 2002 the firm continued its growth with the acquisition of Ando Electric, and in 2005 set the stage for a new level of globalization in its industrial automation business with the establishment of Yokogawa Electric International in Singapore. In 2008 the company entered the drug discovery support market with a new bio test system.

In April 2020, Yokogawa acquired Scarborough-based Fluid Imaging Technologies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In 2021, Yokogawa focused on cloud-based solutions and industrial IoT applications. The company launched the OpreX Control Care cloud service and acquired Industrial Control Systems, Inc. (ICSI) to strengthen its industrial cybersecurity offerings.

In 2026, Yokogawa was contracted to provide the control systems for the first Rolls-Royce SMR nuclear reactors.

Businesses and main products

Yokogawa's main businesses are industrial automation and test and measurement hardware and software.

Some of Yokogawa's main hardware products are Pressure Transmitters, Flow meters, analysers, controllers, recorders and data acquisition equipment.

Yokogawa products are used in different industries requiring process control systems. Depending on the size of the project and the requirements, Yokogawa offers various control systems: DCS, PLC, SCADA and ESD (emergency shutdown). In collaboration with Shell Global Solutions, Yokogawa also offers advanced process control (APC) solutions for refineries, petrochemical plants, and chemical plants.

Centum, Yokogawa's flagship DCS, has the largest capacity among DCSs, supporting up to 1 million device tags.