YOFC Brand Guidelines: The Wuhan Fibre Maker Born of a 1988 Philips Joint Venture

A ministry, a city and a Dutch electronics group.

YOFC is the short name of Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable, known in Chinese as 长飞光纤. It was founded in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, in 1988. A China Daily report from December 2021 names its three founding partners as the former Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the Wuhan municipal government and the Dutch electronics group Royal Philips; Chinese Wikipedia gives the same three and dates the company to May 1988, as does a 2018 profile published by the China Daily site for Wuhan’s East Lake high-tech zone.

The early years were spent learning. According to the 2021 China Daily report, all of YOFC’s fibre-making techniques at first came from Philips, and the company made products to foreign standards without being able to change their technical parameters. The company’s own timeline says it began mass production of optical fibre and cable in Wuhan in 1992 and made its first sales abroad, to the United States, in 1993. A series of numbered capacity expansions followed through the 1990s and 2000s, and in 1999 the company says it added ribbon, ADSS, OPGW and indoor cables.

The partners changed over time. Chinese Wikipedia says the company came to be run by China Huaxin, Wuhan Yangtze Communications Industry Group and Draka Comteq. In December 2013, the Wuhan high-tech zone profile says, YOFC was reorganised into a foreign-funded joint stock company with those three as its key shareholders.

From follower to its own process.

YOFC’s technical story centres on PCVD, plasma chemical vapour deposition, the process used to make the glass preforms from which fibre is drawn. The 2021 China Daily report says the company set up its own research and development department in 2000, and that in 2004 its team solved the problem of using the plasma process to make low water peak fibre, which the newspaper says has been widely used in network building. YOFC’s own timeline dates the commercial launch of its FullBand low water peak single-mode fibre to 2003.

In 2011, the company says, it set up the State Key Laboratory of Optical Fibre and Cable Manufacture Technology, recognised by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology. The 2021 China Daily report says YOFC had by then mastered three kinds of preform technology and held more than 700 invention patents in China and abroad, and it describes the company as the world’s largest supplier of optical fibre, optical cable and preforms; that ranking is the newspaper’s and the company’s, and we give it as such.

The range has widened. YOFC’s website lists preforms, single-mode and multimode fibre, cables for telecoms, railways and power grids, specialty fibres, optical transceivers, structured cabling, submarine cables and RF coaxial cable. The company says it started its maritime business in 2017 by building a submarine cable base together with Baosheng Group. It also says its products and services have reached more than 100 countries and regions.

Recognition, in the company’s account, has mostly come from Chinese bodies: it lists second prizes in China’s National Award for Science and Technology Progress, the China Quality Award and inclusion in national lists of model manufacturers, along with what it calls the European Quality Award in 2018.

Design and documentation.

Optical fibre and submarine cable are hard things to picture. The working product is a strand of glass thinner than a hair, or a cable that spends its life on the seabed, so the companies that make them borrow images from the process instead. The most familiar is the fibre itself: glowing strands fanned out against a dark ground, light running along their length and spilling from the cut ends.

Factory pictures come next. Fibre makers show preform towers, the tall draw towers where a glass rod is heated and pulled into fibre, and long rows of spools. Submarine cable makers show their ships: cable ships alongside a quay, giant circular tanks of coiled cable in the hold, and ploughs or remotely operated vehicles lowered over the stern. World maps traced with submarine routes, each line ending at a landing point on a coast, carry the same story on a website or a trade-show wall.

People appear mostly at work. Technicians splice fibre inside clean tents on a deck or a beach, engineers check repeaters on a test bench, and crews guide cable ashore at a landing site. The trade also has its own stages, such as the OFC conference for optical communications and the SubOptic conference for the submarine cable industry, where the same strands, cross-sections and route maps return on booths and slides.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, where it makes its fibre or cable, which systems it is known for, and which events in its history, from mergers to changes of owner, shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

Two listings and a widening map.

YOFC became a listed company on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 10 December 2014, according to the Wuhan high-tech zone profile, and English Wikipedia says it added a listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in July 2018. The company describes itself as the only A+H share listed company in Hubei province and in the fibre and cable industry. On its ownership page it names China Huaxin Post and Telecom Technologies, a subsidiary of China Poly Group, as its largest shareholder, followed by Wuhan Yangtze Communications Industry Group, and it lists Draka Comteq among its joint-venture partners, noting that Draka has been owned by Italy’s Prysmian since 2011.

Its headquarters remain in Wuhan, and its website lists Chinese plants and subsidiaries in Qianjiang, Lanzhou, Tianjin, Shenyang, Shanghai and Hanchuan. Abroad it names operations in Indonesia, Poland, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Germany. The dates come from several sources: English Wikipedia says the South African factory began work in January 2017, that YOFC bought the Brazilian cable maker Belden Poliron in 2021, and that its factory in Jalisco, Mexico, opened in June 2024; the company says it acquired Radio Frequency Systems (RFS) operations in Germany and Suzhou in 2024, and acquired Broadex Technologies in 2022.

Chinese Wikipedia places the headquarters in Wuhan’s East Lake high-tech development zone, on Optics Valley Avenue; the company’s timeline records ten numbered phases of capacity expansion between 1993 and 2013 before its plants elsewhere in China and abroad opened.

For a design guide, YOFC shows how a joint venture that began by copying a foreign process can build an engineering identity of its own. Compare FiberHome, another Wuhan name in optical communications, and Prysmian, whose Draka arm is a YOFC shareholder. For this guide we use a river blue, a deep navy and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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