Barco Brand Guidelines: The Poperinge Radio Firm That Became a Kortrijk Display Maker

A name built from imported parts.

Barco’s name is an acronym. It stood for Belgian American Radio Corporation, and it described the business exactly: in the West Flemish town of Poperinge, Lucien De Puydt assembled radio receivers from parts imported from the United States, English Wikipedia says.

Dutch Wikipedia fills in the background. De Puydt had sold radios in his father’s jewellery shop from 1920, built crystal sets and, from 1928, radios under the name Stellavox, and from 1931 was the exclusive distributor of Zenith receivers. High import duties charged by weight led him to import only part of the works and to buy cabinets and loudspeakers from local firms, and that called for proper assembly. The firm Belgian American Radio Corporation NV was set up in Poperinge in November 1933, using Belgian capacitors, transformers and furniture alongside American valves and Zenith chassis.

A second company followed. At the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, Dutch Wikipedia says, De Puydt met Frank Bowens, an engineer working for Zenith, and on 12 September 1934 the two founded Cobar, short for Construction belge d’Appareils de Radio. Cobar became the parent that built the radios, Barco stayed the brand, and in 1938 Barco was folded into Cobar while keeping its name. That is why 1934 is generally given as the company’s founding year. Barco began making its own transformers and loudspeakers in 1936.

Belgium was occupied by Germany from 1940. Dutch Wikipedia says the founder’s father, Jules De Puydt, took over Cobar in 1940, and that in 1941 the founder’s nephew Joseph Versavel took over the business and brought in Camiel Descamps; English Wikipedia says Descamps, a radio pioneer, gave the company a new start in Kortrijk in 1941, where it has been based ever since. The sources read for this guide do not describe what the firm made during the rest of the German occupation, to 1944.

From radio cabinets to cinema and control rooms.

After the war the company moved from radio into television. In 1949 it began developing a multi-standard television that could receive different signal standards, and from 1951 it sold a jukebox called the Barc-O-Matic, according to both Wikipedia editions. English Wikipedia says Barco was one of the first European companies to introduce colour television, in 1967, and that it moved into the professional broadcast market in the late 1960s by supplying monitors to broadcasters.

The professional turn shaped everything after it. Dutch Wikipedia says that in the late 1970s Barco developed cathode-ray-tube projection, including for use on board aircraft, and became a supplier of projection technology to computer makers. Over the following decades it added equipment for medical imaging, security and traffic control, training and simulation and digital cinema, Dutch Wikipedia says, while buying and selling businesses at a steady pace. Its graphics division went to the Danish firm Purup-Eskofot in 2001 and became Esko-Graphics; its defence and aerospace division went to Esterline in 2015; and High End Systems, the lighting maker it bought in 2008, went to Electronic Theatre Controls in 2017, according to English Wikipedia.

LED has a place in that story. English Wikipedia says Barco bought the intellectual property of the LED maker Element Labs in 2010. In September 2019 it took a 5% stake in the Shenzhen LED maker Unilumin as part of a “strategic collaboration,” the trade site sixteen:nine reported, giving Barco a supply of LED display components; Jan De Witte, then chief executive, said Barco’s heritage included “some of the most impressive customized LED installations all around the world.”

Dutch Wikipedia sums up the company today as three businesses: Enterprise, for meeting rooms, control rooms and offices; Healthcare, for radiology and operating theatres; and Entertainment, for cinemas, live events and themed attractions, which it says brings in almost half of sales.

Design and documentation.

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.

A listed company on a Kortrijk campus.

Barco is a public company. Dutch Wikipedia says it went to the Brussels stock exchange in the late 1980s to fund further investment, and its shares trade today on Euronext Brussels; English Wikipedia lists it as a component of the BEL 20 index. Dutch Wikipedia names the Vandewiele Group as its largest shareholder, with 25% at the end of 2024. In May 2016 the head office moved to a new “One Campus” site on the Beneluxpark in Kortrijk.

Its leadership changed in 2024. Inavate reported in June 2024 that Charles Beauduin, co-chief executive with An Steegen since 2021, would become chairman from 1 September 2024, leaving Steegen as sole chief executive. The same report described a “focused factories” strategy that expanded manufacturing with dedicated plants, including two new factories in China; English Wikipedia, citing Barco’s 2024 results, says a new factory in Wuxi opened in May 2024, and that the company has its own manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.

The company is still widening its reach. In March 2026 AV Magazine reported that Barco had reached an agreement in principle to buy VerVent Audio Holding, the Saint-Étienne company behind the Focal and Naim audio brands, and to bring it into its entertainment division; Steegen said the aim was solutions “where image and sound reinforce each other.”

For a design guide, Barco shows how an acronym chosen for a 1930s radio assembler can carry a company through television, projection and LED into hospitals, cinemas and control rooms. Compare Unilumin, the LED maker in which Barco took a stake, and NEC, another long-established electronics name. For this guide we use a deep teal, ink and a brass tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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