HannStar Brand Guidelines: Walsin Lihwa’s 1998 Move Into TFT-LCD Panels

A cable group moves into displays.

HannStar was born inside an industrial group. Walsin Lihwa, the Taiwanese company founded in 1966 to make wire and cable, says on its website that it expanded into electronic components, printed circuit boards, semiconductors and LCD panels by establishing Winbond Electronics, HannStar Board, HannStar Display and Walsin Technology. Its timeline puts the panel step in 1998: that year Walsin Lihwa “expanded into the TFT-LCD industry by forming HannStar Display Corp.”

Walsin Lihwa’s profile of the company says HannStar Display was established in 1998 in Yangmei Township, Taoyuan County. English Wikipedia gives the founding as June 1998 and places the head office in Taipei; the company’s Chinese name is 瀚宇彩晶, and Chinese Wikipedia repeats the June 1998 date. The HannStar name is shared with HannStar Board, the printed-circuit-board maker that Walsin Lihwa’s timeline says it formed in 1997.

English Wikipedia, citing a company profile from 2010, says HannStar acquired its TFT-LCD manufacturing technology through technology transfer from Hitachi and Toshiba, and that it had one LCD fabrication plant and one liquid-crystal module plant. The company’s shares were listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in September 2004, the same source says.

Small and medium panels from Tainan.

Walsin Lihwa describes HannStar Display as a maker of TFT-LCDs “primarily for laptop and notebook displays, desktop monitors,” as well as networked appliances, audio and video devices and automotive electronics. It says HannStar runs a 5.3rd-generation LCD plant in the Southern Taiwan Science Park, and a plant in Nanjing for the final assembly of liquid-crystal modules. It also says HannStar makes capacitive touch panels for computers, communications and consumer electronics.

Independent reporting points the same way. On 25 October 2021 the Taipei Times reported that Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs had approved an investment application from HannStar to expand at the Southern Taiwan Science Park, where, the paper said, the company had a fifth-generation LCD plant and a touch sensor and module plant in Tainan. The ministry had granted permission in 2019 for capacity for wearable devices, vehicles, home appliances and touch screens, and HannStar had applied to buy four existing factories and add production lines for micro-LED and next-generation LCD panels. The paper added that HannStar was one of nine local companies the ministry had approved that week to join the government’s three major investment incentive programmes.

The ministry, quoted by the Taipei Times, said the new capacity was “mainly focused on small and medium-sized panel applications,” for mobile phones, wearable devices, notebook computers, tablets, industrial control and automotive uses. The two sources describe the Tainan plant’s generation differently — 5.3rd according to Walsin Lihwa, fifth according to the newspaper — and both are given here.

HannStar also put its name on finished products. English Wikipedia lists four brands: Hannstar for LCD monitors; Hannspree, for monitors, netbooks, laptops, tablets, all-in-one computers and televisions; Hanns·G, for gaming monitors; and I-INC, for LCD monitors.

Display makers in public.

Display-panel makers sell to other companies, so most people meet their work under someone else’s name: the screen in a phone, a television, a laptop or a car dashboard. Their own identities are built for customers, investors and engineers, and they come into view most clearly at trade shows such as the Society for Information Display’s Display Week in the United States and CES in Las Vegas, where makers book large stands to show what their panels can do.

The visual language of those stands is the product itself. Huge curved screens, rollable televisions that rise out of a base and transparent panels set in shop windows or furniture sit beside foldable phones photographed mid-fold and car cockpits wrapped in a single sweep of glass. Close-up photography does the rest: macro shots of red, green and blue sub-pixels, flexible films bent between two fingers and wafer-thin edges seen side-on.

Behind the show floor sits the factory. Company films and reports often show clean fab halls, workers in full-body suits and large sheets of glass substrate carried by robot arms, with plants described by “generation,” a measure of the glass size each line handles. Industry awards add another layer of presentation: Display Week’s Display of the Year awards and CES Innovation Awards appear in the makers’ own timelines.

Their histories run through joint ventures, factory sales and regulatory cases as much as through product launches. This guide sets out what can be checked about each one — who founded it, who owns it and where its panels are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A group name on glass.

HannStar was among the companies in the European LCD cartel case. On 8 December 2010 the European Commission fined six panel makers — Samsung Electronics and LG Display of Korea, and AU Optronics, Chimei InnoLux, Chunghwa Picture Tubes and HannStar Display of Taiwan — for a cartel that it said operated from October 2001 to February 2006. The Commission said the companies met around 60 times, mostly in hotels in Taiwan, in what they called “the Crystal meetings,” agreed prices and price ranges, and exchanged information on production planning. HannStar received no reduction of its fine under the leniency programme, according to the Commission’s table; Samsung Electronics received full immunity as the first to report the cartel.

The case concerned the panels that HannStar and its rivals sold into televisions, monitors and notebooks; the Commission said most such products sold in Europe came from Asia. In 2021 the Taipei Times reported HannStar’s plan to expand its plants in Tainan.

The Commission also set out how the case was run. It said it had sent the companies a Statement of Objections in May 2009 and, after hearing them, reduced the proven length of the infringement by four months. It said the companies knew they were breaking the competition rules and took steps to hide the venue and results of their meetings, and that none of them met the conditions for a reduction on grounds of inability to pay, although two had applied.

Its name works on two levels. HannStar Display is the panel maker that Walsin Lihwa lists among its group companies, beside HannStar Board in printed circuit boards; Hannspree and Hanns·G are the brands English Wikipedia lists for monitors, televisions and other finished products.

For a design guide, HannStar shows how an industrial group can carry one name across circuit boards, panels and consumer screens. Compare AUO, another Taiwanese panel maker named in the same European decision, and Innolux, which was also fined in that case. For this guide we use a deep teal and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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