Brother Industries (Nagoya, Japan) recently announced that it will acquire Domino Printing Sciences (Cambridge, U.K.) for a total investment of $1.55 billion. Brother, a global supplier of office printers, sewing machines, and other equipment, is purchasing one of the world’s top suppliers of digital printing systems for coding and other applications. This deal is an important one for companies in the print technology market—it’s essentially a huge bet on digital printing for industrial uses.

Brother, which was founded in 1908 as a manufacturer of sewing machines, has added printers, machine tools, and other products over the years and reported net sales in excess of $5 billion in 2014. About 70% of the company’s sales are from printers, copiers, multifunctional peripherals (MFPs), and related products, nearly all of which are designed for office use. Brother is also a major producer of thermal label printers, but these devices are mostly low-cost direct thermal units for light industrial uses such as mail labels. Meanwhile, Brother offers digital print technology in one purely industrial market: direct-to-garment textile printing.

Domino is a much smaller company that was founded in 1978 to develop continuous inkjet (CIJ) systems for coding products. Its net sales totaled $546 million in 2014. The company’s core business is still monochrome CIJ coding, but it’s also an established supplier of laser coders and other coders based on drop-on-demand inkjet. In addition to coding, Domino has substantial sales of binary array CIJ systems for variable printing of mail, forms, magazines, and newspapers. Finally, in 2013, Domino shipped its first full color label presses, the N600i Series, based on piezo heads from Kyocera, and thus entered another industrial digital printing market.