TCL CSOT Brand Guidelines: TCL’s Shenzhen Panel Maker, the Guangzhou Plant & APEX

A panel maker set up inside a television group.

TCL CSOT — in full TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology, TCL华星 in Chinese — is the display-panel company of TCL Technology, the Huizhou-based group that traces its own start to 1981 and a joint venture called TTK Household Appliances. TCL Technology’s corporate history dates the panel business to 2009: “TCL CSOT was established, marking TCL’s formal entry into the semiconductor display industry.” English Wikipedia, in its article on TCL Technology, records that in November 2009 TCL formed a joint venture with the Shenzhen government to build an 8.5-generation thin-film-transistor LCD plant in the city.

The company’s own timeline fills in the steps. It says the first Shenzhen project, known as t1, was signed in November 2009 and reached mass production in October 2011, and that a second phase began in November 2013. In April 2014 it set up Wuhan CSOT for a sixth-generation LTPS line; in November 2016 it broke ground on an 11th-generation project in Shenzhen; in March 2017 it signed for a sixth-generation LTPS AMOLED project in Wuhan; and in December 2018 it began a module project in India.

For its first decade the business traded as Shenzhen China Star Optoelectronics Technology. The company says the name changed in November 2019 to TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology. That was the year, TCL Technology says, in which the wider group completed an asset restructuring and split into TCL Technology and TCL Industries, leaving the panel maker on the technology side. English Wikipedia notes that TCL Corporation took the name TCL Technology in February 2020.

Glass for televisions, laptops, phones and cars.

TCL CSOT makes LCD and OLED panels and modules rather than finished sets. TCL Technology lists its range as large, medium and small panels for televisions, electronic whiteboards, video walls, monitors, notebooks, cars, wearables and AR/VR devices, and says the company runs 11 panel lines and five module bases in Shenzhen, Wuhan, Huizhou, Suzhou, Guangzhou and India.

Two acquisitions shaped that map. In August 2020, the company says, it announced the purchase of Samsung’s factory in Suzhou; TCL Technology says the acquisition and handover of that LCD and module plant were completed in 2021. Then, on 26 September 2024, TCL announced plans for CSOT to take 80% of LG Display’s 8.5-generation LCD panel plant in Guangzhou, which mainly makes TV panels, together with all of its module factory, Evertiq reported on 1 October 2024, citing TrendForce. TrendForce expected the deal to lift CSOT’s share of large-generation LCD production capacity beyond 20%, the same report said.

LEDinside reported on 26 March 2025 that TCL Technology had announced on 18 March that the registration changes were complete. The two Guangzhou companies were renamed Guangzhou CSOT Technology and Guangzhou CSOT Display, and CSOT had also bought the remaining 20% of the panel company at a public auction in January 2025, giving it full control of both plants. The plants were to be consolidated in TCL Technology’s accounts from the second quarter of 2025. Before the deal closed, TrendForce had forecast that CSOT would then account for over a quarter of global TV panel supply by area, and noted that more than half of the Guangzhou plant’s customers were South Korean brands, Evertiq reported.

Guangzhou was already a CSOT site. The company says it committed in April 2021 to an 8.6-generation oxide-semiconductor display line there, and that the line, called t9, went into production in September 2022. It calls t9 a high-generation line able to handle LCD, microLED and inkjet-printed OLED.

Its newest project is printing. Notebookcheck reported on 24 October 2025 that CSOT had broken ground on its t8 factory in Guangzhou, an 8.6-generation line that prints red, green and blue OLED materials by inkjet instead of depositing them in a vacuum. The report said equipment installation would run through 2026, with mass production targeted for 2027, and that tablets, laptops and monitors were the first target market.

How display makers present themselves.

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 new logo, then a technology badge.

The company has refreshed its identity twice in recent years, by its own account. Its Chinese-language history says that in January 2023 TCL CSOT released a new logo, with a full renewal of its brand identity system. In November 2024 it launched APEX, which its English site calls “TCL CSOT’s advanced display technology brand.” A company release dated 15 May 2025 says APEX was presented at SID Display Week 2025 in San Jose, built on four pillars named Amazing, Protective, Eco-friendly and X.

The result is a layered set of names. TCL is the group brand, CSOT names the panel maker, and APEX labels the display technology the company shows at trade fairs. Its factories, as TCL Technology lists them, are all in China apart from the base in India.

For a design guide, TCL CSOT shows how a panel maker inside a consumer-electronics group builds a name of its own beside the group’s. Compare TCL, the group’s consumer brand, and LG Display, which sold it the Guangzhou plant. For this guide we use a deep navy, a crimson and a cool glass grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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