We are a team of 80+ professionals spread across 17 locations in key manufacturing and RD centers around the world. Our headquarters is in Japan, but we are an international organization with employees from 8 different countries and speaking over 15 languages. Our Chairman, Mr. Hiroyasu Ito, is a Japanese national with a graduate degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago. Our President, Mr. Peter Opdahl, is a US national with an MBA from the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management and four years of education in Japan at the high school, university, and graduate school levels. Our core is Japanese, but with an international mindset, and we always try to take the best of every culture and incorporate that into who we are.

We focus on technology. As a sales organization, we believe that we cannot sell unless we first gain the trust of our customers. Trust comes from being financially sound, keeping our professional and ethical commitments, and providing our customers with the best service and support they could ever expect. We can only do this by being experts in the products and technologies that we sell, so we educate, train, and provide other necessary support to our people to make this possible. We now have over 30 degreed engineers on staff in Ito Group and only expect that number to increase as we move forward.

We believe that operational efficiency is the key to business success. Our belief -- in fact our Mission Statement -- is that if we can increase the efficiency of our customers' operations, they will make more money and will in turn do more business with us. To do this, we need to work hard at understanding how technology is used in the real world of the factory floor. This is why we spend so much time in factories, and it is why we hire engineers and local staff; If we cannot understand our customer's manufacturing problems the same way that they do, we cannot help them with a complete solution.

We do not do everything. Our overall focus is on technologies and products where we can provide outstanding support and a high level of technical sophistication. Our customers expect this, our suppliers expect this, and we expect this of ourselves. We do carry a range of products, but they are all linked together into product sets that compliment and reinforce each other. This allows us to provide individual products as well as total solutions to our customers. Ultimately, if you need a standard product straight from the catalog, we can provide it. We are at our best, however, when we team with our customers and suppliers to push the envelope and develop new comprehensive solutions together.