Original Title: Steven Yang's Imperial Ambition and Extreme Restraint at Anker Innovations | In-Depth
Author: Ling Feng, Editor: Chao Yi
Through 15 years of turbulent entrepreneurial history, starting from a single power bank, leaping to global dominance in a decade, and now focusing on three strategic directions: charging and energy storage, smart innovations, and smart audio and video, Anker Innovations (300866.SZ), a company listed on both the A-share and H-share markets with a total market capitalization of over CNY 70 billion and nearly 40-fold annual revenue growth over the past 12 years (2014-2025), is still growing fiercely.
According to statistics from the 24Chao Industry Research Institute (TTIR), in the first half of 2026, Anker Innovations achieved operating revenue and net profit attributable to parent company shareholders of CNY 16.605 billion and CNY 1.702 billion, respectively, representing year-on-year growth of 29.05% and 45.86%, both refreshing the best historical records for the same period. From the perspective of growth trends, Anker Innovations' revenue generation capability has maintained strong growth for at least 25 consecutive quarters, and has achieved profitability for at least 13 consecutive years (since 2014), with a cumulative profit of CNY 12.8 billion, making it a true king of industrial cycles.
Looking at the Chinese energy storage market, and even the entire technology hardware industry, the development has been magnificent, resembling an epic history of struggle and technological innovation. The conquest and iteration in the industrial world have always changed drastically around several key factors such as technology, market, and safety. In the fierce market competition, there must be a reason for companies to stand out.
As early as 2020, when Anker approached the CNY 10 billion mark, founder Steven Yang proposed the "Shallow Sea Strategy," attempting to build a 3M, Nestlé, or Procter & Gamble in the consumer electronics field. However, reality threw a bucket of cold water on him. Aggressive expansion and horizontal scaling brought about management dilemmas in the organizational structure. He soon found that Anker could not defeat the unicorns in the same categories.
Two years later, Anker shut down 10 product teams that "seemed impossible to win" in batches, refocusing on underlying supporting technologies in the "shallow sea" such as self-developed chips and core robot components, shifting from horizontal scaling to vertical deep cultivation.
The rethinking and correction of the "Shallow Sea Strategy" brought Anker back to a track of strong growth.
Google Engineer Starts Selling Power Banks
Graduating from Changsha Yali Middle School, admitted to the Computer Science Department of Peking University, and pursuing a master's degree in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin in the US after his undergraduate studies. Steven Yang's educational experience can be described as perfect.
After graduation, he joined Google's US headquarters in 2006 as a senior search engine engineer, and even won Google's highest honor, the Founder's Award.
In 2010, when Steven Yang was replacing a laptop battery on Amazon, he found that the original battery cost as much as USD 100, while non-original batteries varied in quality, making it difficult for consumers to choose. Moreover, products made in China lacked brand premium and were generally hard to sell at high prices.
He keenly realized that he could use China's powerful manufacturing and supply chain advantages to produce products with quality close to the original but at reasonable prices, and there was a huge business opportunity in between.
In the summer of 2011, the 29-year-old Steven Yang made a decision that surprised others and seemed irrational—resigning from his high-paying job at Google, returning to his hometown Changsha to found Hunan Oceanwing E-Commerce Co., Ltd. (the predecessor of Anker Innovations), registering the brand "Anker," and vowing to "let the world use better Chinese products."
At that time, the mainstream play in cross-border e-commerce was basically "white labeling," which meant sourcing goods from factories in regions like the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, attaching one's own brand, and selling them on Amazon to earn the price difference. But Steven Yang was not interested in this model, and he chose to stop after just one year.
In his view, this approach was merely "arbitrage." However, as information transparency increased and competition intensified, the information gap for arbitrage would eventually be leveled.
So at the end of 2012, Steven Yang led the core team south to Shenzhen to set up an R&D center, shifting from "selling goods" to "manufacturing goods." The founding team was almost exclusively of Google background. Relying on the algorithmic and data thinking in their bones, Anker completed a key leap that peers could not achieve.
The fulcrum for achieving this leap was a simple methodology: listening to user needs (VOC, Voice of the Customer). Anker treated negative reviews on Amazon as treasures, using them to improve and iterate products.
For example, users complained about the incompatibility of charging protocols between Android phones and Apple devices, so Anker pioneered PowerIQ dynamic power allocation technology in 2013, subsequently obtaining Apple MFi certification and becoming one of the few Chinese third-party charging brands certified by Apple; users complained that data cables were easy to break, so Anker's cables directly used Kevlar fiber, the same material as bulletproof vests; some consumers found power banks too big and ugly, and Steven Yang noticed that women only carried small bags when going out, so he created a lipstick-sized, highly creative "lipstick power bank," which sold over a million units in 2015, becoming a super hit.
"Innovation doesn't always have to be touted as disruptive. Creating a point that meets customer needs is a successful micro-innovation, and micro-innovation can also create hit products." Adhering to this mindset, Anker Innovations has been cutting through thorns and brambles all the way.
In 2014, Anker won the sales champion in the mobile charging category on Amazon in North America, Europe, and Japan; in 2018, it brought Gallium Nitride (GaN) materials, which previously only existed in the aerospace and military fields, into civilian chargers on a large scale for the first time, pioneering the era of GaN fast charging.
Afterwards, Anker quickly cut into other consumer electronics categories, launching Soundcore speakers to officially enter the audio track; releasing the eufy smart home brand while simultaneously expanding global offline retail channels; and in 2018, launching its first Nebula portable projector.
In August 2020, Anker landed on the ChiNext board, becoming the "first cross-border e-commerce stock." Steven Yang was only 38 years old when the bell was rung. By revenue, the company was already the world's and North America's largest independent mobile charging brand at that time.
On July 2, 2026, Anker Innovations was officially listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the 5th enterprise in Hunan to be listed in both the A-share and H-share markets, and further becoming a benchmark among Chinese companies going global.
The "Shallow Sea" Behemoth
Similar to Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, or 3M, Anker has a wide range of product categories but focuses on areas with relatively low ceilings.
This strategy was named the "Shallow Sea Strategy" by Steven Yang. He first proposed it in 2020 and officially implemented it in 2021. He divided the market image into "deep sea" and "shallow sea," advocating avoiding the "deep sea" red ocean tracks like smartphones and computers with annual sales exceeding USD 100 billion, and focusing on the "shallow sea" segmented markets with annual sales below USD 50 billion that giants have no time to pay attention to.
Such markets are usually relatively fragmented, driven by product cycles, and have a large number of unmet pain points, thus providing opportunities for innovators who are good at洞察 consumer needs and can continuously iterate to launch reliable products.
Anker Innovations started from the "shallow sea" market of charging accessories in its early days and achieved great success. After proposing this strategy, Steven Yang led Anker to charge into more tracks, entering a period of aggressive expansion.
This expansion also seemed to stem from a certain fear of future growth prospects.
Ten years ago, in an interview, when asked whether power banks could grow into a hundred-billion-level category, Steven Yang's answer was somewhat counter-intuitive: "Power banks will probably 'die' in a few years." Ten years later, he still firmly believes in this judgment.
This judgment made Steven Yang eager to find incremental space beyond charging devices. The "shallow sea" strategy has also been verified in the century-long development of companies like Procter & Gamble. Procter & Gamble started with candle soaps, and Tide, Pampers, and Head & Shoulders sequentially drove the doubling of revenue every ten years. From the early 2000s to now, the cumulative total return of its stock price (including dividends, etc.) has reached as high as 820%, achieving the leap from a candle soap workshop to a global daily chemical giant.
Anker is highly similar to Procter & Gamble in dimensions such as product innovation, and Steven Yang also tried to build a behemoth in the shallow sea market. In Steven Yang's own words: "People often say there are two mindsets for running a company: 'raising pigs' and 'raising children.' Pigs are considered for sale and cash-out once grown up. I definitely lean towards 'raising children,' always thinking about how to live longer."
This fear gave birth to the "Shallow Sea Strategy," not going head-to-head with giants like Apple, Samsung, and Tesla, but specializing in shallow sea tracks like charging, energy storage, home security, cleaning, and projection, doing a good job with small and medium categories in clusters, and ultimately becoming a platform-based enterprise.
According to this concept, in the following two years, Anker surged from 1,600 to 4,000 employees, setting up a total of 27 product teams including energy storage, lawn mowing robots, and 3D printing.
However, this gamble encountered a profound strategic backlash.
Steven Yang likes to summarize "knowing why I win, and how I can keep winning." Along with category expansion, he summarized various methods and processes, and full of fighting spirit, "empowered" each business line for two years. The result was that the newly entered categories actually couldn't defeat the unicorns in the same categories.
In the end, nearly ten product lines were cut, leaving only 17 out of 27, and 10 product teams that "seemed impossible to win" were disbanded.
The "defeat" forced out Anker's true core. Steven Yang reviewed and drew two lessons. First, "people before matters." The premise of category expansion is not whether the market is large enough, but whether there is a creator who can "find certainty in uncertainty"; second, in the past, the company paid too much attention to "surpassing peers," and the team was used to staring at competitors to "improve products," losing the ability to make "creative products" starting from user needs.
After refocusing on the "first principles," Steven Yang also began to think about the essence of the shallow sea market.
It should be known that in 2025, there were more than 1,000 global participants in the mobile charging market, with the CR5 being only 15.2%. Anker alone ranked first with a revenue share of 4.8%. The industry pattern is extremely fragmented, and an absolute leader has not yet been formed.
Steven Dongping Zhao, co-founder of Anker, often says, "With our current size, the vast majority of categories account for no more than 5% in the global market. The macroeconomy actually has no impact on us. Self-awareness and self-evolution, being willing to find reasons from ourselves, and solving problems by changing ourselves."
After profound reflection, Steven Yang corrected the "Shallow Sea" strategy, increasing the investment in underlying technologies within the shallow sea track, deeply cultivating the shallow sea segmented tracks, and shifting the focus from horizontal category expansion to vertical self-research of core underlying technologies.
For example, self-developed chips are used to support proprietary products such as earphones, energy storage, and security, focusing on shallow sea scenarios like home cleaning and security. The company's R&D investment has continued to climb. In 2023, 2024, and 2025, it invested CNY 1.414 billion, CNY 2.108 billion, and CNY 2.893 billion in R&D respectively, accounting for 8.1%, 8.5%, and 9.5% of operating revenue respectively, showing a rising trend year by year. The compound annual growth rate of R&D expenses is about 43%.
In the first half of 2026, Anker Innovations' R&D investment reached CNY 1.869 billion, a year-on-year increase of 56.5%, refreshing the highest historical record for the same period again. The proportion of R&D to revenue rose to 11.26%, and the proportion of R&D personnel was as high as 56.47% (3,523 people).
The effect of this approach was directly written into the 2026 interim report. In the first half of the year, it achieved operating revenue of CNY 16.605 billion, a year-on-year increase of 29.05%, and net profit attributable to parent company shareholders of CNY 1.702 billion, a year-on-year increase of 45.86%; non-net profit attributable to parent company shareholders was CNY 1.439 billion, a substantial year-on-year increase of 49.65%.
Looking from the historical rearview mirror, as a consumer electronics manufacturer, Anker Innovations has not been significantly affected by industry cycles. For example, global smartphone shipments declined by 11.3% in 2022, but during the industry adjustment period, Anker's profit still rose against the trend by 16%.
This strategy of "bounded" category expansion starting from "first principles" not only gains strong risk resistance but also continues to drive Anker to sail in the "shallow sea" track.
Charging into the New Blue Ocean of Energy Storage
Similar to Procter & Gamble, Anker's product innovation also starts with user feedback, mining essential needs through first principles, and then developing mass-producible products.
This replicable capability mechanism enables Anker to continuously launch innovative products that solve users' real pain points, running through all business lines, from the early GaN chargers to today's consumer-grade energy storage products.
Global geopolitical conflicts have sharply increased, energy crises in Europe and the US have occurred frequently, high energy costs coupled with backward infrastructure such as power grids have led to an explosion in overseas household energy storage demand. User-side energy storage can peak shave and valley fill, and be self-generated and self-used, thereby reducing electricity costs.
It is predicted that the global consumer-grade energy storage market size is expected to increase to CNY 560.5 billion by 2030, with a CAGR as high as 19.6%. According to usage scenarios, consumer-grade energy storage is divided into three categories: household energy storage, portable energy storage, and balcony energy storage, all of which Anker has deployed.
Compared with mobile charging, energy storage, as a technology-intensive industry, is obviously more challenging, and user needs are more complex. It tests Anker's product power even more.
Since this year, in the field of balcony photovoltaic energy storage, Anker has launched the industry's first plug-and-play 3500W AC coupled integrated energy storage solution Solarbank Max AC, supporting 7kWh to 42kWh.
North American families are mostly detached houses, while Europe has a high proportion of renting population. Because photovoltaic modules need to be laid on the roof in advance, a large number of European residents cannot install traditional household energy storage equipment. Balcony energy storage is almost the only choice.
Plug and play, no need for construction teams to come to the door for installation, photovoltaic panels can also adjust their direction by themselves, and can be easily disassembled and taken away when moving the equipment. Therefore, Anker products, which focus on convenient disassembly and assembly, have quickly entered family scenarios.
Moreover, its latest product E5000 Pro has reduced the electricity price per degree to €318–398/kWh (calculated based on the German price of €1,599/official website original price of €1,999), with a single-degree electricity price drop of 57.5%. The decrease in the cost of electricity per degree further shortens the user's investment payback period.
These advantages helped the company rank first in the global balcony energy storage segmented market with a 14.6% share in 2025.
In the household energy storage track, according to InfoLink shipment statistics, the top five in the global household energy storage market in 2025 were Tesla, Huawei, BYD, Pylon Technologies, and Sungrow. In the first quarter of this year, Sigenergy, M麦田 (Maitian), and Deye led in shipments.
Anker, on the other hand, seized the incremental market by relying on channels and rich experience in going global. In 2025, it reached 6.9% of installed capacity in Germany, ranking 4th. In the first quarter of 2026, it significantly increased to about 10%, becoming one of the manufacturers with the most obvious increase in market share in Germany.
In the portable energy storage market, head brands have strong advantages, and Anker occupies the third place globally. This track is still in a period of high-speed growth. Similar to the mobile charging track, there are many industry participants, and head brands have formed a concentrated advantage. The first place is speculated to be EcoFlow, with a market share of about 29.3%. The second is HiNa (Huabao Xinneng), with about 13.9%. Anker ranks third with 10.2%.
With the efforts of the energy storage series, the company's three major segments (charging and energy storage / smart innovations / smart audio and video) achieved revenues of CNY 8.93 billion, CNY 4.186 billion, and CNY 3.485 billion respectively in the first half of this year, with year-on-year growth rates reaching 31.02%, 28.77%, and 24.53% respectively. Charging and energy storage remains the company's fastest-growing cornerstone.
As early as two years ago, Steven Yang said: "In 2024, the revenue proportion of Anker's traditional power bank business was less than 12%. Power banks are no longer the company's core main category."
With the further explosion of the overseas energy storage market and the iterative upgrade of Anker Innovations' products, energy storage will also become a new growth point for the company.
Going Global and a Bigger Gamble
Involution and going global have become a new consensus and direction for China's energy storage industry.
On the one hand, the industry continues to expand crazily, on the other hand, opponents who have killed red eyes in the price war, coupled with overseas policy siege, going global has become the most important factor in evaluating a company's core competitiveness.
According to statistics from the 24Chao Industry Research Institute (TTIR), over the past 12 years (2014-2025), Anker Innovations' overseas revenue scale grew from CNY 741 million to CNY 29.483 billion, an increase of 38.79 times. The proportion of overseas revenue has never been lower than 96%. In the first half of 2026, its overseas revenue increased by 26.68% again to CNY 15.729 billion.
Financial reports show that Anker Innovations' products are sold to more than 180 countries and regions. In the first half of this year, the revenue proportion of the two major mainstream markets in North America and Europe continued to increase. North America contributed 45.55%, and Europe won 26.69%, and both revenues grew by about 30% year-on-year.
Looking at the outstanding enterprises among Chinese enterprises going global, even compared with SHEIN, Transsion Holdings, Insta360, and Roborock, there is恐怕 only Anker that can obtain such strong brand mindshare in the two world's high-end markets.
It maintains a leading position in brand influence and market share in the North American market, and achieves high-speed growth in consumer-grade energy storage in the European market. Its Anker brand has been among Kantar's "Top 50 Chinese Globalizing Brands" for ten consecutive years, and the eufy brand has also been on the list for three consecutive years.
It can be said that Anker is a benchmark for Chinese manufacturing going global, and more importantly, a banner for Chinese manufacturing to attack the high-end markets in Europe and the US.
The interim report also hides a set of numbers worth chewing. The company's official website (proprietary online channel) revenue was CNY 1.837 billion, a year-on-year increase of 39.19%. The proportion of the proprietary official website rose to over 10%, and the proportion of offline channels (Costco, Walmart, Best Buy, and even Apple retail stores) exceeded 31%.
The revenue structure continues to be optimized. However, the revenue contributed by Amazon is still as high as 46%, and third-party platforms account for as high as 57%. Getting rid of the reliance on a single platform and directly reaching users is still a problem Anker needs to face in the future.
Looking to the future, Steven Yang has begun to bet on AI.
He believes that consumer electronics categories iterate extremely fast. No hardware category is forever safe. Only by continuously investing in underlying technologies and continuously creating new categories can one survive. He has emphasized many times that AI is a life-and-death threshold for consumer electronics enterprises. Those who do not actively embrace it will be eliminated.
Action is rapid. On the one hand, Anker continues to dig deep into technology "downwards," establishing the "2023 Laboratory" in 2023 for in-depth technological R&D; on the other hand, it reshapes its mission, vision, and values. In Steven Yang's words, Anker needs to transform from a "Series 5 company" to a "Series 7 company." Series 5 can gain a foothold with quality plus micro-innovation, but Series 7 requires ultimate innovation.
In May 2026, Anker released its first self-developed "computing-storage integration" chip Thus, embedding the computing unit directly into the NOR Flash storage array, realizing "where the data is, the computing is." It was first搭载 on the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro earphones, and the call noise reduction effect won the Guinness World Records certification.
On the investment side, Anker has heavily invested in Southchip Technology, led the investment in the embodied intelligence enterprise AMIO; deployed the pool cleaning robot Xingmai Innovation, attempting to reversely output the underlying technology back to its own product lines.
In Steven Yang's view, humanoid robots will be a super market even larger than automobiles (USD 2 trillion). "But in the earliest stage of this market, you don't need to make the most general-purpose sedan right away. You can make pickup trucks, make excavators, but you must first thoroughly digest this set of underlying technology stack."
In terms of robots, Anker has a three-level roadmap: 2D mobile robots like sweeping machines and lawn mowers have been mass-produced. Currently, it is promoting the first 3D mobile robot—a security robot dog. Longer-term humanoid general-purpose robots are also within its vision.
The ultimate picture Steven Yang gives for Anker is not the next Apple, but Texas Instruments or Procter & Gamble and Nestlé in the consumer hardware field, using the leading position and stable performance of dozens of segmented categories to dig a moat that others find difficult to replicate.
However, Anker is not completely without worries. Chips are a typical business of high investment, long cycle, and high risk, requiring continuous R&D investment and technological accumulation. Anker's R&D expense ratio of around 10% is not low in the consumer electronics hardware circle, but compared with professional chip companies, this ratio is still relatively low.
Although Anker has product experience in consumer electronics, it is still a novice in the field of chip design, and AI audio chips still need time to verify.
In the field of embodied intelligence, Anker did not choose to go head-to-head with enterprises like Unitree and Agibot, but cut in from security robot dogs. This choice can not only synergize with the original product lines but also avoid competition with industry leaders. But the same problem is that embodied intelligence requires huge funds to be invested in "brain" R&D, and Anker's capability in this area is still very weak.
Steven Yang has swum into a big fish in the original "shallow sea," but the gamble on chips and embodied intelligence is still hard to determine the winner.