Company overview. Coates US, Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary and North American headquarters of Coates Group, a privately held digital-signage and merchandising company based in Sydney, Australia. Coates Group has supplied the quick-service restaurant (QSR) market for over 50 years; its U.S. entity was established in 2016 at 112 N. May St. in Chicago's West Loop, near client McDonald's. The Chicago office employed roughly 80 people as of 2019, with about 250+ staff globally across offices in Sydney, Chicago, Tokyo, Dubai, Guangzhou, Mumbai, Paris, and Shanghai. No public ticker; financial figures are not publicly reported.
Products / operations. Coates US, Inc. designs, manufactures, and services end-to-end digital merchandising for QSR and retail brands: outdoor drive-thru digital menu boards, indoor digital menu boards, self-order kiosks, and related displays, all run on its proprietary Switchboard™ cloud CMS, which integrates point-of-sale data and license-plate recognition for personalized drive-thru messaging. Hardware is manufactured in China and Taiwan and imported/assembled for U.S. deployment. In 2022, McDonald's named Coates Group its single global digital-menu-board CMS provider and one of two approved menu-board hardware vendors.
Patent-litigation posture. Coates US, Inc. is an operating company, not a non-practicing entity. Its single tracked appearance is as a co-petitioner (recorded as "plaintiff") in the PTAB inter partes review Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. et al. v. Manufacturing Resources International, Inc. (IPR2023-00220, filed Dec. 15, 2022), challenging patents on display cooling.
Notable context. The IPR was part of a broader defense against Manufacturing Resources International (MRI), an Alpharetta, GA display maker that asserted five cooling-system patents against Samsung, Coates, and Palmer Digital Group in ITC Inv. No. 337-TA-1331 and in a parallel suit in the Eastern District of Texas — a plaintiff-friendly venue. The ITC ultimately found no violation, terminating the investigation in early 2024. The disputes center on high-brightness outdoor/semi-outdoor displays, the product category at the core of Coates' drive-thru menu-board business.