Anker Innovations unwilling to be "choked" by Amazon?

Anker Innovations has always been a benchmark for Chinese consumer electronics companies going overseas.

On the official website of Amazon in the United States, Anker Innovations' 25,000mAh laptop power bank is priced at $95.99, equivalent to 679 yuan; while on domestic Taobao, similar capacity laptop power banks are generally priced below 400 yuan.

"Making dollars" is indeed stronger than "struggling to survive" domestically.

In 2024, Anker Innovations' revenue and net profit reached 24.71 billion yuan and 2.211 billion yuan, respectively, with year-on-year growth rates exceeding 40% and 30%.

However, a turning point is quietly approaching.

Starting in June 2025, due to safety incidents involving some models of power bank products, Anker Innovations had to recall products in multiple countries, including China and the United States.

After a large-scale recall of power banks, Anker Innovations' performance growth began to slow down, with third-quarter revenue in 2025 at 8.152 billion yuan, only a year-on-year increase of 19.88%, returning to the growth rate level of the same period in 2022.

In the face of gradually weakening performance, Anker Innovations' strategy is to continue financing.

After issuing 1.1 billion yuan in convertible bonds in November this year, Anker Innovations submitted an IPO prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, planning to list in both "A+H" markets.

On one hand, Anker Innovations plans to continue developing new categories and explore more areas of smart products; on the other hand, it will strengthen the establishment of flagship stores and experience centers in major cities worldwide, creating a global direct sales network that connects online and offline channels.

The true intention behind establishing a direct sales network is to reduce dependence on Amazon, which has contributed over 50% of its revenue in the past three years.

Whether this can truly boost Anker Innovations' performance is under scrutiny.

Global Store Expansion

In the first three quarters of 2025, the North American and European markets contributed 9.505 billion yuan and 5.645 billion yuan to Anker Innovations, respectively, accounting for over 70% of total revenue.

Anker Innovations' success in overseas markets is the result of both the era's endowment and its strong market strategies.

After the explosion of the smartphone market, the demand for charging and accessory products surged, but original charging products were expensive, while low-priced white-label charging products had issues with inconsistent quality and rough designs.

Anker Innovations accurately captured this market opportunity, assembling products like power banks using the complete domestic supply chain and entering the North American market under its independent brand, primarily targeting Amazon as a sales channel.

In 2014, Anker Innovations became the sales champion in the mobile charging category on Amazon in North America, Europe, Japan, and other markets, and to this day, Amazon remains its primary sales channel.

In the past three years, Amazon has contributed over 50% of Anker Innovations' revenue.

Anker Innovations' founder, Yang Meng, has also publicly admitted: "To be honest, if we hadn't started selling on Amazon over a decade ago and grown together with the Amazon team, I don't think we would have the opportunity to sit here today and talk about building a global brand."

Amazon has propelled Anker Innovations' charging products to secure a place in the global market Since 2020, Anker Innovations has firmly held the position of the second largest in the global mobile charging product market and is the largest independent mobile charging brand in both the global and North American markets.

Moreover, Anker Innovations boasts a gross margin that is enviable among its peers. In the first three quarters of 2025, it reached as high as 43.3%, just under 4 percentage points lower than Apple.

However, as revenue scales up, reliance on a single channel has become a potential risk for Anker Innovations—if Amazon's e-commerce traffic declines, Anker Innovations would be the first to suffer.

In fact, Amazon's e-commerce business is currently facing challenges from the rise of new platforms like Temu.

In December last year, there were reports that Amazon asked Anker Innovations to choose between selling on Amazon and Temu.

Although Amazon denied this rumor, Anker Innovations did indeed choose to close its store on the Temu platform at that time, only to reopen later.

Dependence on a single platform is becoming a significant concern for Anker Innovations' development.

One of the key purposes of this IPO is for Anker Innovations to raise funds to establish more sales channels and reduce its reliance on Amazon.

Anker Innovations plans to expand into social media, e-commerce platforms, and offline retail channels, and will accelerate the establishment of its own global offline retail stores.

In terms of offline retail store plans, Anker Innovations will set up flagship stores and experience centers in major cities around the world, while also increasing investment in its official self-operated website to establish an integrated global direct sales network online and offline.

In September of this year, Anker Innovations opened its first offline store in North America, "Anker Powers tm:rw," located in Times Square, New York.

However, the cost of establishing offline stores overseas will further squeeze Anker Innovations' profit margins.

It is no longer uncommon for Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers to open stores overseas, but this typically occurs in higher-priced sectors like smartphones.

For example, as of the end of the second quarter of this year, Xiaomi has established about 200 Xiaomi stores overseas and plans to build 10,000 overseas Xiaomi stores in five years.

Because of this, alongside channel development, Anker Innovations needs to explore more high-priced products to cover the costs of large-scale channel deployment.

Currently, in addition to its main charging brand Anker, Anker Innovations has also established the smart home brand eufy, with its smart locks and robotic vacuum cleaners priced at $329.99 and $239.99 respectively, equivalent to RMB 2,333 and RMB 1,697.

Striking Out in All Directions

In terms of category exploration, Anker Innovations has its own set of theories.

According to Anker Innovations' shallow sea strategy, it primarily expands into niche categories with a market size below $80 billion. This is because the user demands in these categories are diverse, and the competitive landscape has not yet solidified, presenting significant innovation space and high growth potential.

The core logic of this strategy is to avoid direct competition with traditional giants in mature markets and instead leverage its advantages to achieve rapid growth in niche, high-potential, and relatively low-competition peripheral markets (shallow sea).

"It's about the category I am in; the individual market size may not be very large, but I can work on many small and medium categories. We also take mobile accessories as an example, like power banks, charging cables, and plugs, each of which may have a market size of three to five billion. Clearly, Anker is following the path of multiple small and medium categories "Yang Meng said.

Specifically, this includes creative printing, consumer drones, cleaning appliances, smart security devices, smart control devices, projectors, speakers, wearable electronics, wireless headphones, and more.

Although Anker Innovations has launched consumer-grade UV texture printers and the Omni E28 sweeping and mopping integrated machine that align with its shallow sea strategic direction, it seems that the practical implementation does not always follow this logic.

Recently, Anker Innovations has targeted the direction of embodied intelligence, laying out a technology stack and product system for robotics, planning to start with smart vacuum robots and lawn mowing robots, and develop towards future home smart service robot forms.

Home smart service robots are not an absolutely defined niche market; they carry the market's vision of replacing a series of white goods products such as washing machines, which has become a major anxiety for current leading home appliance companies.

Many large manufacturers are continuously increasing their investment in home smart robots.

For example, in 2024, Google's DeepMind and Stanford jointly launched Mobile ALOHA, which can perform tasks such as meal preparation, stir-frying, serving, laundry, playing with cats, and watering flowers;

In the same year, Haier and Leju Robotics jointly launched the general-purpose humanoid robot KUAVO, which can perform hand operations such as watering flowers and arranging flowers.

Chinese manufacturing can now establish a foothold in markets like North America with independent brands, as Anker Innovations has escaped the fate of past Chinese manufacturers relying on OEM overseas.

Now, as Anker Innovations intensifies its efforts across categories, its intention to gradually swim from the shallow sea to the deep sea market seems increasingly clear, and the challenges of competing head-on with giants may also be on the horizon