Leyard Brand Guidelines: The 1995 Beijing LED Maker That Bought Planar and eyevis

A Beijing display maker that went public in 2012.

Leyard is a Beijing company. Its full name is Leyard Optoelectronic Co., Ltd., written 利亚德 in Chinese, and the company profile compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence and carried by Stock Analysis in November 2026 says it was incorporated in 1995 and was formerly called Beijing Leyard Electronics Technology. The same profile names Li Jun as its chairman and general manager.

English Wikipedia describes Leyard as a publicly traded electronics maker whose main business is screen displays of very large dimensions, alongside LED lighting. It says the private company went public on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, joining the ChiNext board for growth companies in March 2012.

The company’s first large public moment came four years before that listing. English Wikipedia says that at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games Leyard’s displays were used for the opening ceremony: it made the displays that lit the Olympic Rings, and supplied a 1,300-square-metre scroll of its “Ground Bar” LED product, a floor display built to take people, and even the wheels of a car, moving across it.

From around 2013 Leyard looked abroad. English Wikipedia says that in 2013 it signed a joint-venture agreement with MIC Electronics, which was to distribute Leyard’s products in India, with a factory there to follow once sales reached an agreed level, and that by 2014 the company was putting fresh capital into its Hong Kong subsidiary and a Beijing subsidiary to pay for international expansion, as its overseas orders grew.

Today the S&P Global profile groups the business into three segments: Intelligent Display; Cultural Tourism and Nighttime Entertainment; and AI and Spatial Computing.

Planar in Oregon, eyevis in Germany.

Leyard’s most widely reported step outside China was a purchase in the United States. In November 2015, English Wikipedia says, Leyard bought Planar Systems, the Oregon display maker, through its subsidiary Leyard American Corporation; Planar’s own Wikipedia entry dates the closing to 27 November 2015 and says Planar, previously listed on NASDAQ, has since been an independent subsidiary of Leyard, with its headquarters, leadership and staff still in Oregon.

Planar brought a long history with it. It was founded in 1983 as a spin-off from the Solid State Research and Development Group of Tektronix, English Wikipedia says, and was the first American maker of electroluminescent displays; in 2006 it had bought Clarity Visual Systems, which became its control room and signage business.

The second step was in Europe. On 10 May 2018, rAVe [PUBS] reported that Leyard and Planar had completed the purchase of eyevis, which it described as a German manufacturer of large screen systems for control rooms, broadcast, virtual reality and simulation, together with eyevis’s own subsidiary Teracue, a maker of IPTV and video-networking systems that eyevis had bought in 2014. The deal had been announced in April that year. Marco Bruines, then chief executive of Leyard EMEA, told the publication that the two companies would bring more resources to customers in Western Europe.

The result is a group of several brands rather than one. rAVe [PUBS] described the Leyard Group as a family of companies and brands including Planar, eyevis and Teracue, working in displays, entertainment and lighting; the S&P Global profile lists products that range from small-pitch LED walls and commercial displays to cinema screens, virtual production and outdoor three-dimensional screens.

Planar continues to trade under its own name: in November 2026 rAVe [PUBS] was still reporting new Planar products and showrooms in the United States.

The LED wall 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.

One group, several display names.

Leyard’s products sit in places where people watch rather than browse. The S&P Global profile says its products and solutions are used in command and control rooms, conference displays, broadcasting studios, retail, sports events and city landmarks, and it names stadium LED screens, creative indoor rental displays and virtual shooting among the solutions on offer.

That range shows why the group keeps more than one name. Leyard is the Chinese parent and a listed company in Shenzhen; Planar, in Oregon, carries its own long American history in specialty displays; eyevis brings a German control-room business. rAVe [PUBS] reported in 2018 that the European businesses would share marketing, sales, installation support and customer service in the EMEA region, while each name stayed in use.

The company has also moved beyond screens. Its S&P Global profile lists a Cultural Tourism and Nighttime Entertainment segment, covering night tours, venue and museum shows and immersive entertainment, and a segment for AI and spatial computing, with work on digital humans, XR and industry simulation. English Wikipedia also describes LED lighting as part of the business.

For designers, the most visible Leyard work is the most public: the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing, where, English Wikipedia says, its displays lit the Olympic Rings and its floor screen carried the performers. That moment made a display maker part of a staged spectacle, and much of the group’s later work, from studios to stadiums, sits in the same territory.

For a design guide, Leyard shows how a listed Chinese maker can grow into a family of display brands while keeping each acquired name. Compare Planar, the Oregon display maker it owns, and Unilumin, another Chinese LED display group listed in Shenzhen. For this guide we use a deep crimson, a near-black and a cool slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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