WhereIsAtlas · China
How Anker Went From Laptop Batteries to Audio Brands
A Shenzhen accessories maker sold chargers on Amazon, skipped the retail shelf entirely, and ended up competing with JBL and Bose in speakers and earbuds.
Anker Innovations was founded in Shenzhen in September 2011 by Steven Yang, making replacement laptop batteries. It moved into chargers and power banks, and until 2016 sold almost exclusively on Amazon Marketplace and Newegg — reaching Western shoppers directly rather than through retail chains. It built a family of brands, most importantly soundcore for audio, launched in April 2018. By 2021 soundcore was competing in active-noise-cancelling earbuds against Sony, Bose and Apple. It is listed in Shenzhen as 300866.
The least glamorous possible start
Anker began in September 2011 in Shenzhen, founded by Steven Yang, making replacement laptop batteries [1]. Within its first year it had moved into smartphone chargers, wall adapters, portable power banks and conferencing equipment [1].
That is worth pausing on. Replacement laptop batteries are about as close to a commodity as consumer electronics gets — a product bought on price, from a factory whose name nobody remembers. It is also precisely the position most Chinese manufacturers occupied: making the thing, without owning the customer.
The move that actually mattered
Anker's advantage was not in the product. It was in the distribution.
Until 2016, Anker products were sold almost exclusively on Amazon Marketplace and Newegg [1]. That single decision let a Chinese company put its own name in front of Western buyers without ever persuading a retail buyer to stock it — no shelf space, no distributor, no retail margin. The Amazon marketplace of the early 2010s was newly capable of doing that at scale, and Anker was one of the companies that understood it first.
The company also bought expertise. In early 2014 it hired Zhao Dongping, then Google's head of sales in China, who became president in 2020 [1]. Anker started selling audio products the same year [2].
From product line to brand
Anker's audio business did well enough that in April 2018 it was given its own name: soundcore [2]. The brand makes Bluetooth earbuds, over-ear and open-ear headphones, portable speakers and smart glasses [2].
The important thing soundcore did was go upmarket. Its reputation rests substantially on active-noise-cancelling earbuds — the Liberty Air 2 Pro, and the Liberty 3 Pro in 2021 [2] — which is the segment owned by Sony, Bose and Apple. A company that began by copying other people's batteries ended up selling a premium product in a category defined by brand loyalty and acoustic engineering.
The rest of the family followed a similar logic. eufy launched in 2016 for smart home products; ROAV the same year for automotive; Anker SOLIX in 2023 replaced the earlier PowerHouse branding for power stations and home energy storage, with its X1 unit taking a Red Dot Design Award in 2024 [3][4]. In August 2025 the Nebula projector brand was merged into soundcore, combining audio and visual products under one name [2].
The brand that did not survive
Not every Anker venture worked, and the site of a failure is worth recording.
The company entered 3D printing as AnkerMake, launching the M5 through a Kickstarter campaign and shipping two machines, the M5 and M5C [3]. In 2025 it discontinued the printer line outright. What replaced it was eufyMake, a creation-tools brand built around UV flatbed printers such as the E1 — machines that print onto objects rather than building them up [3].
It is a small story and a revealing one. Anker's method is to enter a category, find out fast whether it can win, and then either scale the business into a brand or fold it into one. Nebula went into soundcore. AnkerMake became eufyMake. The portfolio is not sentimental, and a product line that cannot justify itself is wound down rather than carried.
What this has to do with how things are made
Anker is the clearest case in this registry of a transition that the manufacturing industry has a name for. It began on the commodity end — making products that other companies' brands could be attached to — and graduated into owning brands itself.
That is the move from selling unbranded or lightly-branded goods to being the name on the box, and it is why a company like Anker can now compete with JBL and Bose instead of quietly supplying them. A company that owns a brand owns the customer; a company that only owns a factory owns a purchase order.
Anker kept both ends for a while, which is why its brand list runs from chargers to solar storage to robot vacuum cleaners. The logic is not that these products belong together. The logic is that Anker had learned to sell direct to consumers and could apply that skill to anything.
Where it has cost them
Growth in Western markets brought two kinds of trouble, and both are worth recording accurately.
The first is product safety. Anker has recalled several power-bank models for fire risk since 2023. In June 2025 it voluntarily recalled five PowerCore models over a manufacturing issue involving lithium-ion cells supplied by a single vendor, and by September 2025 the US Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 33 incidents of fire or explosion affecting about 481,000 units [1].
The second is trust. eufy had stated that footage from its cameras was stored locally and could not be reached through the cloud. The security researcher Paul Moore found that images and video were being uploaded to eufy servers leased through Amazon Web Services, that the material was tagged with user data, and that it remained on those servers after he deleted it and closed his account [3]. The YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips, then an Anker sponsor, ended the relationship, and in December 2022 The Verge reported that eufy had substantially rewritten its published privacy commitments [3].
A brand built on being the trustworthy affordable option cannot afford a privacy claim that does not hold. This is the same failure pattern as the Ashley Madison case in a much smaller key: the product being sold was confidence, and the claim did not survive inspection.
The politics arrive
In September 2025, John Moolenaar, the chair of the US House Select Committee on China, asked the Department of Commerce to investigate Anker over potential security risks and tariff evasion [1].
That request is not a finding, and this entry does not treat it as one — it is an allegation made by a legislator, and the outcome is not established. But its existence is the point. A Chinese consumer brand that reaches a certain size in the American market attracts political attention, and that is now part of the cost of the strategy Anker pioneered.
What Anker proves
Anker's story is not that Chinese manufacturing is cheap. It is that the distance between making a product and owning a brand is shorter than it used to be, and that a company willing to sell direct can cross it in about a decade.
The company went from unbadged laptop batteries to noise-cancelling earbuds competing with Bose. It did so on a marketplace that let it skip the shelf, and it did it under its own name. Every other Chinese consumer brand now selling in the West is running a version of the same play — and Anker is the one that got there first and stayed.
Entries in this story
Sources
- Anker — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
- Soundcore — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
- Eufy — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
- Anker SOLIX — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
- Anker Innovations Technology (SHE:300866) Financials Overview — StockAnalysis (2026-09-19)