Jenoptik Brand Guidelines: The Jena Photonics Group Formed From the Zeiss Combine in 1991

A young company with an old address.

Jenoptik is a young company with an old address. Its own chronicle traces the story to 1846, when Carl Zeiss opened an optical workshop in Jena, in Thuringia; the physicist Ernst Abbe and the chemist Otto Schott later joined the work, and the workshop grew into a major industrial centre. German Wikipedia says Abbe went on to set up the Carl Zeiss Foundation, which came to own both the Zeiss company and the Schott glassworks.

The Zeiss firm’s wartime record belongs to this prehistory. German Wikipedia says that after early conflicts with the National Socialist government, the company took part in the rearmament of the Wehrmacht in the 1930s and sponsored so-called racial research at the University of Jena, and that during the Second World War Zeiss employed thousands of forced labourers at its main site in Jena and at other production sites and affiliated companies. In June 1945 American forces moved senior Zeiss staff from Jena to Heidenheim before Thuringia passed to Soviet control; the Red Army dismantled most of the Jena works in 1946–47, and the plant was nationalised on 1 July 1948 as VEB Carl Zeiss Jena, while a new Zeiss company was set up in Baden-Württemberg.

The name itself came out of East Germany. In the mid-1950s Carl Zeiss Jena registered Jenoptik as a trademark, German and English Wikipedia say. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Treuhandanstalt privatisation agency took over the VEB Carl Zeiss Jena combine — 13 companies and about 30,000 employees, according to both the company and Wikipedia. On 10 September 1990 the Jena parent company was renamed Jenoptik Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH.

In 1991 it was split in two. Under an agreement signed on 25 June 1991 by the Treuhandanstalt, the states of Baden-Württemberg and Thuringia and the Zeiss companies, the microscopy and other optical businesses went to a new Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH, later wholly owned by Zeiss of Oberkochen, while the state-owned Jenoptik GmbH became the legal successor to the combine. It took over optoelectronics, systems engineering and precision manufacturing, and the task of restructuring industry in Jena. Lothar Späth, the former premier of Baden-Württemberg, became its chief executive.

From conglomerate to photonics group.

In the 1990s Jenoptik was a conglomerate. The company’s chronicle records the purchase of the Stuttgart plant builder Meissner+Wurst in 1994, a stake in the Berlin telecoms company Krone in 1996, and ESW-Extel Systems Wedel, a mechatronics business, in 1997. German Wikipedia calls the Meissner+Wurst purchase its largest, one that opened markets in Asia, and says Jenoptik sold its stake in what had become M+W Zander in 2005 to concentrate on optics, shrinking a group that had employed about 10,000 people.

What remained was photonics. Jenoptik Diode Lab was set up in Berlin-Adlershof in February 2002 with the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut to work on high-power laser diodes, and a research centre for plastic optics opened in Triptis in May 2005, German Wikipedia says. From June 2008 the company worked with Leica Camera on digital imaging, and Wikipedia says it took part in developing and making the electronics of the Leica M9. Its products, as Wikipedia describes them, run from coated lenses, aspheres and micro-optics to laser diode bars, industrial laser machines, roughness and form-measuring instruments, and traffic-monitoring cameras with radar and laser sensors.

Two projects show the range. Jenoptik delivered lenses to NASA in 2019 for the Mars 2020 mission, its chronicle says; English Wikipedia says these were lens assemblies for the engineering cameras of the Perseverance rover, which reached Mars in February 2021. Closer to home, the company decided in June 2021 to build a cleanroom factory for micro-optics at Airportpark Dresden; ground was broken in September 2022, the topping-out ceremony was held on 6 September 2023, and the plant was inaugurated in spring 2025. The company calls it the largest investment project in its recent history.

Acquisitions after 2017 pushed it further into optics and automation. The company names Five Lakes Automation in Michigan in 2017, Prodomax Automation in Ontario in 2018, INTEROB of Spain in January 2020 and the Hamburg optical test-equipment maker TRIOPTICS in July 2020. In October 2021 it announced the purchase of BG Medical Applications and the Swiss components maker SwissOptic. A medical-technology site in Berlin, making optical components and systems for dentistry and robot-assisted surgery, opened in June 2023, the company says.

Light, lenses and laboratories.

Photonics companies sell things most people never see. Their lasers sit inside machine tools, their transceivers inside data-centre racks, and their detectors inside instruments, telescopes and physics experiments. So the way they present themselves leans on a small set of images that make light visible: a laser beam crossing a dark optical table, the glowing end of a fibre, a row of pluggable transceiver modules lined up for a switch, or a photomultiplier tube and a sensor chip photographed under studio light against black.

The catalogue matters as much as the advertisement. Many makers of optics and components publish long product catalogues of lenses, mirrors, mounts, filters, tubes and diodes, each part with a drawing, a part number and a page of specifications. That catalogue habit gives much of the sector a shared look: clean technical photography, plenty of white or black space, careful diagrams and an engineering sans or a restrained serif, with colour used sparingly, often for a single accent.

The trade shows are where the industry gathers in person. Photonics West, LASER World of PHOTONICS and OFC, the optical fibre communication conference, are among the events where companies show new lasers, modules and detectors, and their stands and press releases often borrow the same visual language of beams, fibres and glowing chips. Company histories also lean on science: makers of detectors and light sources often point to the research projects and observatories that have used their parts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, what it has bought or sold and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Pending deals are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

More Light, and a narrower business.

Jenoptik became a stock corporation, JENOPTIK AG, on 1 January 1996 and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange on 16 June 1998. The state of Thuringia sold its remaining 14.8 percent to ECE Industriebeteiligungen in November 2007, German Wikipedia says; in June 2011 a holding company of a Thuringian state foundation bought part of that stake, giving the state about 11 percent, and ECE sold the rest of its holding in April 2015. The company now says it has almost 4,500 employees, is headquartered in Jena and is traded on the MDax and TecDax indices.

The brand narrowed with the business. In 2019, under the claim “More Light,” Jenoptik launched a new structure, culture and brand at SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco, its chronicle says, grouping its work into three photonics divisions — Light & Optics, Light & Production and Light & Safety — with mechatronics under the separate Vincorion brand, introduced in September 2018 according to German Wikipedia. Vincorion was sold to a fund managed by STAR Capital Partnership, and the company says that sale was completed on 30 June 2022. English Wikipedia says the group was reorganised in 2022 into Advanced Photonics Solutions and Smart Mobility Solutions; the same year Jenoptik presented HOMMEL ETAMIC as the brand of its non-photonic industrial-metrology business.

The name has also travelled beyond the company. English Wikipedia says Concord Camera licensed the Jenoptik trademark in 2004 for 20 years and produced a range of compact digital cameras under it. Stefan Traeger led the executive board from May 2017; in late November 2025 the supervisory board announced that he would step down on 15 February 2026, the company says.

For a design guide, Jenoptik shows how a trademark registered by an East German state combine became the identity of a listed photonics group. Compare Zeiss, which shares its Jena origins, and TRUMPF, another German laser and photonics maker. For this guide we use a deep slate blue, a cool grey and a pale lens white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jenoptik’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.