WhereIsAtlas · China
How FiiO Beat Astell&Kern in Japan
A Guangzhou company most people have never heard of took all five top slots in Japan's biggest portable-audio retailer's 2025 player rankings — and outsold the Korean flagship on revenue.
FiiO is a privately held Chinese audio manufacturer incorporated in Guangzhou on 19 April 2007, founded by engineers who came out of BBK. It makes portable players, DACs and amplifiers, in-ear monitors and, unusually, cassette and CD players. In e-earphone's 2025 annual rankings it took all five top spots in portable players by unit sales, and its M27 was the best-selling player by revenue, ahead of Astell&Kern's flagship. Revenue was reported at about RMB 160 million in 2023.
The numbers that actually prove something
Claims that Chinese audio brands are "taking over" are usually made without evidence. Here is some that is at least concrete.
e-earphone is Japan's leading specialist portable-audio retailer. Its published annual sales rankings for 2025, covering 1 January to 31 December, are broken down by category and by both units and revenue [7][8].
In portable players by unit sales, all five top positions are FiiO: the JM21, M21, DM13 BT, RR11 and Snowsky ECHO MINI [7].
In portable players by revenue, FiiO took first, third and fifth: the M27 came first, Astell&Kern's A&ultima SP4000 — priced at ¥623,700 — came second, the FiiO M21 third, iBasso's DX340 fourth, and the FiiO JM21 fifth [7].
In DACs and amplifiers, FiiO took all five top positions by revenue and all five by units [8].
That is a strong, verifiable result from a retailer that publishes real sales data, and it says something specific: in the Japanese portable-audio market, a Chinese brand is the volume leader and the revenue leader in the categories it competes in, ahead of both the Korean high-end specialist and the Japanese incumbents.
What it does not say
The same rankings show the limits, and they matter.
In overall sales by revenue, the top spot went to Technics, second to Sony, third to the FiiO M27, fourth to Sony again, and fifth to Moondrop [8]. So a Chinese player reached third overall — behind a Japanese brand twice.
In overall sales by units, the rankings are dominated by Sony and by ear-tip and accessory brands such as Pentaconn and Eletech [8]. FiiO's dominance is real but category-specific: portable players and desktop DACs and amplifiers, not audio as a whole.
And there is no rigorous market-share study — no shipment series, no analyst report — demonstrating that Chinese brands have taken measurable global share from Western or Japanese incumbents. The honest position is that there is strong category-level retail evidence in one major market plus a great deal of trade commentary, and not a quantified global shift. Anyone claiming the latter is going beyond the data.
A company that publishes almost nothing about itself
FiiO's corporate disclosure is thin to the point of being interesting. It is a privately held limited liability company, incorporated in Guangzhou on 19 April 2007 [4]. It is not listed. Its founder is publicly known only as "James" — TechPowerUp's interview with him is titled "Interview with James Chung (FiiO Founder)", but Chinese-language press calls him only 飞傲James and has never published his Chinese name [2][6].
The temptation is to fill that gap. The surname 钟 is often romanised "Chung", and a shareholder with that surname holds the largest stake, so it is easy to conclude the two are the same person. This entry does not make that claim, because no source confirms it. Where a company's own disclosures are silent, the correct answer is "not established" rather than a plausible guess.
One related trap worth recording: a stock quote circulates for "飞傲国际" under ticker 869468, which looks like a listed FiiO. It is not. That entity is Fuzhou FiiO International Trading Co., Ltd., on a regional equity exchange — a different company with a similar name.
From accessories to audio
FiiO was founded by engineers who had worked at BBK, the Chinese consumer-electronics group, and who chose portable hi-fi specifically to avoid competing with their former employer [5]. The company started as an accessories maker rather than an audio brand; its first product was the E5 in 2007 [6].
The pivot came from an export. The E3 portable headphone amplifier sold unexpectedly well in Europe and the United States, which showed the founders that a Chinese company could sell serious portable audio abroad under its own name rather than as an anonymous supplier [6].
That is the same move Anker made with chargers and Edifier made with speakers, arriving at the same place by a different route: a Chinese manufacturer discovering that owning a brand abroad is worth more than owning a factory.
The retro bet
FiiO's most unusual decision is to build hardware for formats the rest of the industry has left behind: cassette players, CD players, vinyl equipment, and discrete R2R digital-to-analogue converters — the resistor-ladder design that predates the mass-market DAC chip [5][6].
A 2026 Guangzhou municipal business feature described FiiO as possibly the only audio company in the world pushing into retro across its whole range [5].
It is a strange strategy for a company whose reputation rests on measured technical performance, and it appears to be working: the DM13 BT, a portable CD player, was among FiiO's five top-selling players in Japan by units [7].
Three brands, three prices
FiiO sells under three names at different price points: FiiO itself for mid-to-high-end and professional products, JadeAudio (翡声) for value-focused direct sales, and Snowsky (雪漫天), introduced in 2024, aimed at a younger market [2][6].
The structure is the same playbook Harman runs across sixteen audio brands and that Anker runs across seven — one manufacturer, several brands, each holding a different position on the price ladder. The difference is that FiiO built its brands rather than buying them, and it did so from a company with reported revenue of roughly US$22 million.
Why a small company matters to this story
FiiO's revenue is tiny. About RMB 160 million in 2023, or roughly US$22 million, against Harman's billions [6]. It competes in a market segment — dedicated portable players and desktop DACs — that mainstream audio companies have largely vacated, because there is not enough volume in it for them.
That vacated space is the whole story. Japanese and Western firms stopped building specialist portable players as phones absorbed casual listening; a Guangzhou company staffed by ex-BBK engineers kept making them, added desktop gear, and then started making cassette decks. The result is that in Japan — a market with a deep and discerning portable-audio culture — a brand most Western listeners could not name now outsells the Korean flagship on revenue.
The lesson is not that China has won audio. It is narrower and more useful: in the categories the incumbents decided were too small to bother with, the incumbents are gone.
Where FiiO sits
FiiO is the clearest example in this registry of a Chinese company built by engineers from a larger Chinese company, competing on technical reputation rather than price alone. Edifier did it by buying a Japanese legend. Anker did it by owning the Amazon shelf. FiiO did it by staying small and being good at something specific, in a segment the giants abandoned.
Its exports grew 33 per cent in the first eleven months of 2025, with more than 90 per cent under its own brand [5]. That last figure is the one to watch: it means FiiO is not quietly supplying someone else. It is selling as itself.
Entries in this story
Sources
- About FIIO — FiiO (2026-09-19)
- Interview with James Chung (FiiO Founder) — TechPowerUp (2026-09-19) ↩
- FiiO industrial park and factory tour — TechPowerUp (2026-09-19)
- 广州飞傲电子科技有限公司 — company profile — 启信宝 (via qichaxun) (2026-09-19) ↩
- 飞傲：白云区的音频企业 — 广州白云发布 (Guangzhou Baiyun district) (2026-09-19) ↩
- 耳边谈：飞傲创始人访谈 — 什么值得买 (2026-09-19) ↩
- e☆イヤホン 2025年 年間ランキング — プレーヤー部門 — e-earphone (2026-09-19) ↩
- e☆イヤホン 2025年 年間ランキング — DAC/アンプ部門 — e-earphone (2026-09-19) ↩
- How Chi-Fi is re-energizing the audiophile hobby — FutureAudiophile (2026-09-19)
- FiiO — Wikipedia (2026-09-19)