Coates Circuit Products started life in the early 1960’s as a small but specific division of Coates Screen Products Ltd, based at St. Mary Cray in Kent England. They in turn were part of the Coates Group of Companies which was founded in 1877. Dedicated to the development and production of resists and inks for the printed circuit board industry, our products were sold internationally through Coates Brother (Export) Limited and manufactured at the St. Mary Cray, Kent, factory.

In 1983 it was decided to merge the product range manufactured by Coates for the electronics industry with the existing Coates reprographics company at Midsomer Norton, near the city of Bath, and the new company was entitled Coates Electrographics. From that time a policy of organic growth was followed, and we can now claim to be a truly global organization. We have direct sales and support offices in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, USA, Taiwan and China. In other regions we either operate through our group companies or dedicated distributors and agents.  Our major success was the introduction to the PCB manufacturing industry 40 years ago of a range of 2-pack epoxy solder resists that very rapidly became an accepted as an industry standard. These were the first series of solder resists which gained world-wide approval from many O.E.M’s. Combined with other processing resists, the solder resist family expanded over the years, and we were the first company to produce commercial U/V curing inks, and the first to produce high specification U/V setting inks for professional PTH use.

Our next innovation step was to introduce the first screen-printable photo-imaging solder resist, which was called IMAGECURE®. Today IMAGECURE® is another industry standard and has gained world-wide acceptance and approval.

In 1992 we commenced development work on other photoimageable resists systems, and chemical family expanded to include both etch resist IMAGELINE™ and flexible coverlay IMAGEFLEX™.

Further developments of our technology have taken place and in 2004 we launched a new solder mask range imagecureSMART. This new range includes the normal advantage expected from our products along with the added benefits of being Halogen Free (typical content below 300 ppm), fast exposure allowing the use of LDI (Laser Direct Imaging) technology, developable in both solvent and Aqueous solution, improved end performance to withstand increasing high temperature cycling tests etc.

Coates Circuit Products is committed to quality, and to service. Attainment of ISO9001:2000 is witness to the former, and the world-wide representation with a geographical diversity greater than any comparable company in the industry, allows the latter to be achieved. In 1998 the Coates pursuit of an effective Environmental Management System allowed them to be accredited to ISO14001, one of the first companies in the industry so to do.