On February 28 local time, YOFC signed an appointment agreement with Sir David Payne, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, a recipient of the UK knighthood, and the inventor of the Erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA), during 2024 MWC Barcelona. Sir David Payne was appointed as the foreign director of the Expert Advisory Committee of YOFC's State Key Laboratory of Optical Fibre and Cable Manufacture Technology (YOFC State Key Lab), responsible for helping YOFC and the YOFC State Key Lab push the boundaries of innovation in new and specialty optical fibre technologies and new application technology of optical fibres to drive  high-quality development.

YOFC State Key Lab is one of the first restructured state key laboratories in China set up by YOFC in partnership with China Telecom and Southern University of Science and Technology. Its predecessor was the State Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber  and Cable Manufacture Technology exclusively built and developed by YOFC, which was rated as excellent in the national evaluation of state key laboratories of enterprises organized by the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2017-2018.

Sir David Payne is a leading professor at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, and director of the Zepler Institute for Photonics and Nanoelectronics/Optoelectronics Research Centre. As a world-class technology pioneer, what he has been working on exerts an enormous impact on telecom and laser technologies over the past 40 years. The huge transmission capacity of the current internet directly benefits from the Erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA) invented by Sir David Payne and his team in the 1980s. His pioneering work in optical fibre manufacturing in the 1970s gave rise to almost all specialty optical fibres in use today, including optical fibre lasers widely employed in industrial manufacturing and national defense.

Sir David Payne visited YOFC many times. For example in 1998, he visited YOFC together with Mr. Charles Kao, the Nobel Laureate in Physics and the inventor of optical fibre. Sir David Payne's visits have provided valuable insights into the innovative development of YOFC and the YOFC State Key Lab.