Yealink Brand Guidelines: The Xiamen USB-Phone Start-Up Behind Desk Phones & Video Bars

Engineers on a Xiamen rooftop.

Yealink began in Xiamen, in China’s Fujian province, in 2001. The business paper Yicai, in a profile published in October 2022, names three founders — Chen Zhisong, Lu Rongfu and Zhou Jiwei — engineers who had left a struggling traditional telecom company, all of them from its research staff and all graduates in communications-related subjects; Chinese Wikipedia gives the same three names. The early years were lean: Yicai wrote that the founders once tried to bring in their landlord as an investor, and turned down his offer of the office itself as his stake. The company’s own website now says it was “founded by four engineers.” Its first office, Yicai reported, was a three-room unit added on the roof of the Hualian Electronics building in Xiamen.

The first product was a USB telephone, made for use with internet calling software such as Skype at a time when long-distance calls were expensive. From 2001 to 2005 the firm worked as a contract maker of these phones for other brands, Yicai and Chinese Wikipedia say, and added echo cancellation that helped its phones sell. The company says it became a leading USB phone supplier in 2005.

That year it began its second line, SIP phones: desk telephones that run over internet protocol inside office communication systems, a market that grew as companies in Europe and North America replaced analogue phone systems. At first these too were made for other brands. The name of the company’s own label came from the early work, the company says: “Yealink” joins “Yeah” and “Link,” inspired by the joy of its very first clear test call.

From contract work to an own brand.

The turn came when the founders chose to sell under their own name. Yicai reports that the company set up the Yealink brand and gradually reduced its contract work, because contract manufacturing left it dependent on its customers’ sales channels, and that by 2011, its tenth year, it had settled on giving up original-equipment work altogether, including work it had done for Huawei. Its SIP phones then went through several generations, sold mainly outside China.

Video was the next line. Yealink launched its video-conferencing systems in 2015, Yicai and Chinese Wikipedia say; Yicai describes a first generation for privately run networks and a second built around cloud services, with the company pairing its own meeting software with room hardware. On 17 March 2017 the company listed on the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Chinese Wikipedia says; China National Radio’s website reported before the share subscription that the issue price was the highest for a new A-share listing in six years. The same report, drawing on the company’s own materials, said its products were sold through authorised distributors in nearly 100 countries and regions and worked with more than 80 communication platforms.

Partnerships with the big meeting platforms followed. Yicai dates Yealink’s strategic partnership with Microsoft to 2018, when it developed Microsoft Teams desk phones, and says it went on to develop more than ten kinds of product with Microsoft; the company’s own timeline dates its Microsoft and Zoom partnerships to 2015. In 2020 Yealink added a third product line for personal and remote work, with portable speakerphones, personal cameras and headsets, Yicai reported.

Rooms, racks and integrators.

Conference-room and pro AV makers sell a room more than a gadget. Their catalogues and websites tend to show the same scene: a meeting table, a large display on the wall, a slim video bar mounted under the screen, microphones set into the ceiling, and a small touch panel on the table that starts the call, dims the lights and switches the source. The equipment that makes the room work is usually out of sight, in a rack in a cupboard or above the ceiling tiles.

That hidden layer is where much of the industry’s engineering sits: control processors, signal switchers and extenders, amplifiers and digital signal processors that shape the audio of a room. These are boxes with plain faceplates and model numbers rather than consumer-style names, and their brands live on the label, the rack ear and the software screen an installer sees when setting up a system.

Most of these products do not reach buyers off a shelf. They are specified and wired in by systems integrators and installers working for companies, universities, schools and public bodies, and many makers run their own training and certification programmes for those partners. The trade gathers at fairs such as InfoComm in the United States and Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), where new panels, cameras and processors are shown on stands built to look like finished meeting rooms.

For a design guide, the category shows identity working at two scales: a calm, uncluttered room for the people who use it, and a dense, technical system of labels, connectors and part numbers for the people who build it. The makers in this guide are set out with what can be checked about who founded them, who owns them and where their products are made.

Desks, rooms and a Shenzhen listing.

Yealink is listed in Shenzhen and based in Xiamen. Its website describes a range that runs from the front desk to the boardroom: the T-series IP desk phones, all-in-one video bars such as the A40, MVC room systems with multi-lens cameras, and ceiling microphones in the CM range, alongside headsets, speakerphones and the MeetingBoard display. The company says it employs more than 2,000 people, more than half of them engineers; that it opened its first “Smart Industrial Park” in 2023; that it joined the UN Global Compact in 2024; and that in 2025 it launched a Global Operational Headquarters in Singapore.

Its rooms are built to run other companies’ meeting software as much as its own. Yicai wrote in 2022 that Yealink held certifications from Microsoft, Zoom and Tencent, and the company’s product menus are arranged by platform — Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms and Teams and Zoom phones — and by room size, from huddle rooms for up to five people to spaces for more than twenty. Research sits at the centre of how the company presents itself, and Yicai reported that research staff made up about half of its workforce in 2021. The same profile described how the chip shortage of 2020 and 2021 pushed Yealink towards designs that could use several alternative chips, mainly Chinese-made ones, so that it could adapt products to whatever parts it could buy.

For a design guide, Yealink shows how a former contract manufacturer builds a brand around hardware that sits beside other companies’ software: a short coined name, product families named by letter and number, such as the T-series phones and the A40 bar, and a range sorted by room size. Compare Poly, which also grew from desk and conference phones into video, and Zoom, whose meeting rooms Yealink equips. For this guide we use a deep green, ink and pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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