Barco invented the wireless-meeting dongle. Now it’s buying Focal and Naim — what’s actually going on here?
Every wireless-sharing dongle covered in this series so far — Yealink’s, MAXHUB’s, the ones bundled into half the meeting rooms across this region — owes something to a single Belgian company most IT buyers have never directly bought from. Barco didn’t just make an early wireless presentation device. It built the patent portfolio that’s currently being used in court to decide who else is allowed to make one.
Where did Barco actually come from?
Barco started in 1934 in Poperinge, Belgium, as the Belgian American Radio Corporation — assembling radios from American-imported parts, which is where the name comes from. After founder Lucien De Puydt died in 1941, radio engineer Camiel Descamps relaunched the company in Kortrijk, where it’s still headquartered today. Barco moved into television in the 1950s, became one of the first European manufacturers of color TV in 1967, and built its way into professional broadcast monitors, then large-screen projection in the 1980s, eventually becoming a major projection supplier to IBM, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard. Today the company runs three core markets: Entertainment (cinema and live-event projection), Enterprise (meeting rooms and control rooms), and Healthcare (surgical and radiology displays). It’s listed on Euronext Brussels, employs more than 3,000 people, and reported €964 million in revenue for 2025 with €71.6 million in net profit.
Did Barco actually invent the meeting-room dongle?
Yes, and the timeline matters for everything that follows. Barco launched ClickShare in 2012 as what it calls an industry first — a small USB button that plugs into a laptop and shares its screen wirelessly to a meeting-room display with one click, no app, no cables, no Wi-Fi password to hunt for. By 2019, ClickShare was installed in more than 700,000 meeting rooms worldwide, more than triple the installed base of its nearest competitor, and Frost & Sullivan handed Barco its Global Market Leadership Award for wireless content sharing the following year. The product line has kept moving since: ClickShare Conference added Bring-Your-Own-Meeting support in 2017, and the newest generation, ClickShare Hub, launched in June 2025 built on Microsoft’s Device Ecosystem Platform — turning what started as a screen-sharing dongle into a full AI-assisted Teams Rooms system.
How many patents does Barco actually hold, and what happens when someone gets close?
Barco’s ClickShare portfolio alone now covers more than 110 patents across major jurisdictions, including a unitary patent enforceable across 17 EU member states since June 2024 — on top of the 900-plus patents the wider company holds. And Barco doesn’t just file patents; it enforces them, repeatedly and publicly. In 2019 it sued Delta Electronics and its Vivitek subsidiary over a lookalike product called LauncherPlus, which was withdrawn from the US market within a year. In the same period, Barco’s case against Sahara Presentation Systems forced that company to strip the Wi-Fi chip out of its Clevershare product to avoid infringing. Most notably, Barco sued Yealink in the US in November 2023 over six ClickShare patents tied to Yealink’s WPP20 and WPP30 wireless presentation devices — Yealink suspended US sales of both products in April 2024, and in November 2025 a jury in the Eastern District of Texas confirmed the infringement and awarded Barco just over $900,000 in damages. Barco has since taken the same fight to Europe’s Unified Patent Court, seeking to block Yealink’s wireless conferencing products there too. Not every case has gone Barco’s way — a Dutch and German manufacturer successfully defended its own “Klick & Show” product after the European Patent Office invalidated the specific patent Barco was suing on, so the company’s enforcement record is strong rather than perfect.
That track record is worth keeping in mind given how many of the brands covered elsewhere in this series now ship their own version of the same basic idea — a small dongle that turns any screen into a wireless meeting display. Yealink has already been through a confirmed, court-tested infringement finding on exactly this category. MAXHUB’s wireless dongle line, covered earlier in this series, performs a near-identical function — tap-to-pair, plug-and-play screen mirroring, no drivers — and there’s no public record of Barco having pursued similar action against MAXHUB specifically. That absence doesn’t prove anything either way; it simply means the question of how close is too close hasn’t been tested against every competitor in this space, only some of them, and Barco’s history suggests it’s a question the company is willing to take to court when it decides the line has been crossed.
Why is a projector company suddenly buying a hi-fi speaker brand?
In March 2026, Barco announced an agreement to acquire VerVent Audio Holding, the French-British parent company of premium loudspeaker maker Focal and British hi-fi manufacturer Naim Audio, for an enterprise value of roughly €135 million. It’s a genuinely unusual move for a company with zero prior consumer-audio or retail experience — VerVent brings more than 80 boutique stores and a name recognised in the high-end home audio world, somewhere Barco has never operated. CEO An Steegen framed the deal as Barco “going all-in on Entertainment,” aiming to pair its projection and visualisation leadership with VerVent’s audio expertise to offer fully integrated audiovisual systems for high-end home cinemas and premium consumer spaces, alongside Barco’s existing professional cinema business. VerVent generates around €110 million in annual revenue, a modest add against Barco’s overall size, and will sit inside Barco’s existing Entertainment division rather than become a new one. Some in the existing Naim and Focal community have flagged the phrase “portfolio rationalisation” in Barco’s own statement as a signal that some legacy product lines could be at risk under new ownership — a reasonable point of caution for anyone watching the brands rather than just the balance sheet.
Has Barco actually reached the Arabian Gulf?
Yes, and longer-established than most of the brands covered in this series. ClickShare and Barco’s wider projection and display lineup are available through multiple long-standing authorised distributors across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman, with regional stock typically covering the full ClickShare range from small-huddle-room models up to large boardroom and dual-display configurations. Barco’s regional presence here predates much of the more recent dongle and software competition covered elsewhere in this series, which is itself a useful data point: this is the brand whose patents the newer entrants now have to be careful not to walk too close to.
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Sources & references
- Wikipedia, “Barco (manufacturer)” — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barco_(manufacturer)
- Barco, “About Barco” — barco.com/en/about/this-is-barco
- Barco, “Barco timeline” — barco.com/en/about/this-is-barco/timeline
- PR Newswire, “Barco Applauded by Frost & Sullivan for its Continued Domination of the Wireless Content Sharing Market” — prnewswire.com
- Barco, “Barco launches ClickShare Hub” — barco.com
- Barco, “Introducing ClickShare Hub” — barco.com
- Barco, “Barco takes action to enforce its ClickShare patents in the US” (2019) — barco.com
- Barco, “Barco successfully enforces ClickShare IP against competitors in the U.S.” (2020) — barco.com
- Barco, “Barco enforces its ClickShare IP against Yealink before the Unified Patent Court” — barco.com
- Barco, “Barco successfully enforces six patents against Yealink in US” — barco.com
- AV Magazine, “Barco awarded damages for ClickShare patent infringement” — avinteractive.com
- AV Magazine, “Barco enforces ClickShare IP against Yealink in Europe” — avinteractive.com
- JUVE Patent, “Kindermann repels Barco infringement claim over presentation systems” — juve-patent.com
- Barco, “Barco to acquire VerVent Audio Holding, strengthening its integrated audiovisual portfolio” — barco.com
- Strata-gee, “Video Projector Maker Barco Acquires Audio Company VerVent, Owner of Focal and Naim” — strata-gee.com
- audioXpress, “Barco to Acquire Focal and Naim Audio Business Worldwide” — audioxpress.com
- Headphonesty, “Focal and Naim’s New Owner Has a 2028 Deadline That Puts Entire Product Lines at Risk” — headphonesty.com