Absen Brand Guidelines: The 2001 Shenzhen LED Screen Maker Seen Around World Cup Pitches

Shenzhen, 2001.

Absen, written 艾比森 in Chinese, was founded in Shenzhen in 2001. Its listed company is Shenzhen Absen Optoelectronic Co., Ltd., whose shares joined the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2014 under the code 300389, as The China Project reported in January 2023; a company profile from S&P Global Market Intelligence, updated in November 2026, gives the same founding year and places the headquarters in Shenzhen.

Its chairman is Ding Yanhui. In a profile published in November 2025, the China Securities Journal told the company’s story through him, describing more than twenty years spent building Absen from a Shenzhen start-up into an LED display business selling around the world.

The same profile set out how Absen sees itself. Ding called it a “big-screen brand company”: since its founding it has concentrated on research, marketing, sales and service, and has chosen not to expand up or down the supply chain, so as not to end up competing with its own customers. The paper described Absen as “asset-light” by the standards of its industry and quoted Ding saying that patents, the brand and a global sales network are its core assets; the company counts more than 1,300 patents. The paper also dated the start of Absen’s move to digital management systems to 2007, when it installed its first customer-relationship software, and said every order, purchase and supplier record now runs through linked systems.

Stages, stadiums, studios and meeting rooms.

Absen’s 2020 annual report summary, filed in April 2021, describes its main business as the research, production and sale of full-colour LED displays, and splits the range into five product lines. Advertising displays serve billboards, transport hubs and street furniture; stage displays, including the PL and AX Pro series, serve corporate events, concerts and television; commercial displays go to retail chains, shopping centres, theme parks and exhibitions; data-visualisation displays go to control rooms and broadcast studios; and the conference line includes the Absenicon meeting-room screens. The same report names Daktronics, Leyard and Unilumin among its main competitors.

The screens are built in China. The China Project reported that the state broadcaster CCTV ran two segments on Absen in December 2022, in one of which its journalists visited the company’s “smart factory” in Huizhou, Guangdong.

Absen screens have appeared at large events. According to The China Project, the company supplied about 2,000 square metres of LED fence screens for all eight venues and all 64 matches of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. The same article listed a transparent LED screen on a high-rise building near Vienna, the stage display of the 2022 G20 summit in Bali, a screen at the Utah Jazz arena in Salt Lake City, and Airlot 21 in Orlando, a virtual-production stage that opened in March 2022. Its research spending from 2020 to 2022, the article said, went into areas including MicroLED, chip-on-board displays, glasses-free 3D screens and extended-reality virtual production. The China Securities Journal added LED floor screens for NBA courts, and work seen at the European Championship and at Hollywood, Disney and Universal Studios projects.

Outside China the brand is sold through subsidiaries. A January 2018 announcement from Absen Inc., based in Orlando, Florida, carried by AVNation, previewed its stand at Integrated Systems Europe in Amsterdam that February. Its centrepiece was a 4K display some 24 feet wide built from the new Polaris indoor rental panels, which the company said used Auto-Lock, Auto-Eject and Fast-Switch curve-locking mechanisms for quick set-up on stages. The same release introduced COBALT, which Absen said stood for Chip-on-Board Advanced Light Technology, and an Acclaim fixed indoor panel aimed at retail, corporate, house-of-worship and out-of-home settings. COBALT, the release said, was Absen’s first chip-on-board product, developed for fine-pitch screens at corporate live events and other rental work, and the stand was to host a presentation called “NXTGEN” three times a day, with a seminar led by the product director of Absen Europe.

LED display makers.

LED display makers sell a product that is meant to disappear behind the picture it shows, so their brochures and websites lean on the places where their screens are seen. The usual picture is a stadium at night: a scoreboard or a ring of fence screens glowing above a full stand, with the maker’s own name nowhere in sight. Concert stages come next, with LED backdrops stacked behind the band and built from hundreds of small tiles hung from rigging.

Indoors, the showcase shifts to curved video walls in control rooms, broadcast studios and corporate lobbies, where the wall itself becomes part of the architecture. A newer image is the virtual-production volume, a ring or arc of LED panels around a film set that shows a moving background in camera, which lets makers present themselves to studios as well as to stagers and sign companies.

Much of the industry’s branding is shown first at trade fairs. Integrated Systems Europe and InfoComm in the United States are where new panel ranges, finer pixel pitches and rental frames are usually unveiled, and stands are often built as showpieces for the products, with the company’s name set on a screen rather than painted on a wall. Product names tend to be short codes and series letters, written for the integrators, rental houses and technicians who order the panels.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker: who founded it, where it is based and listed, where it says its displays are made, and what it has published about its own logo. Where a claim rests only on the company’s word, the guide says so, and the colours shown are our own interpretation rather than any official palette.

Listed in Shenzhen since 2014.

Absen remains an independent listed company trading under its own name. The S&P Global profile describes it as making LED large-screen display products and professional audiovisual solutions, with indoor, outdoor, rental, MicroLED and all-in-one screens, and also lists energy storage equipment among its products. Its markets in that summary run from digital out-of-home advertising and retail to broadcasting, education, rental and staging, sports and places of worship.

Looking ahead, the China Securities Journal reported that Absen is concentrating on meeting rooms, exhibitions, retail, sports venues and outdoor advertising, with more than 30 solutions built for specific settings, and that Ding intends the company to keep a high-end brand position while raising research spending. The paper said Absen had cut low-margin business in China to concentrate on higher-value customers.

For a design guide, Absen shows a Chinese display maker that presents itself under a short Latin-letter name next to its Chinese one, with a range sorted by where the screens are used: billboards, stages, shops, control rooms and meeting rooms. Compare Leyard and Unilumin, which its 2020 report names as competitors. For this guide we use a stage black, a deep teal and a warm signal orange with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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