Anker Innovations founder and CEO Steven Yang has predicted that power banks will likely "die out within a few years" — a striking statement coming from the company that built its global reputation as the world's leading power bank brand.
Yang drew an analogy to MP3 players, cassette players, and CD players, noting that the typical lifespan of a consumer electronics product — from when people start buying it to when they stop — is roughly only 10 years. "Consumer electronics is a category that rises and falls fast," he said. "Chances are, if you've owned an MP3 player, you've also owned a cassette or CD player — and the gap between buying one and abandoning it is about a decade."
The comment reflects a shift already well underway in Anker's own business. Founded in 2011 and once known as the undisputed "king of power banks," Anker reported total revenue of 30.514 billion yuan in 2025, up 23.49% year-on-year. Of that, charging and energy storage products brought in 15.402 billion yuan — about half of total revenue — with traditional power banks no longer the core revenue driver. In Q1 2026, revenue reached 7.608 billion yuan, up 26.93% year-on-year, though net profit attributable to shareholders fell 4.87% to 472 million yuan.
Yang has previously disclosed that power banks accounted for less than 12% of Anker's revenue in 2024, no longer the company's primary product category. The growth in charging and energy storage has increasingly come from home solar and energy storage products instead — reflecting a broader shift in product philosophy from "powering devices" to "powering scenarios," driven in part by rising demand for home backup power and distributed energy storage in Europe and the US.
The remarks also land amid lingering fallout from a major quality-control crisis. Over the past year and a half, Anker has carried out a wave of product recalls across major global markets — including roughly 710,000 units in China and 1.16 million in the US — with direct losses from refund-based remediation alone exceeding 200 million yuan. At Anker's 2025 annual shareholder meeting in May, the company acknowledged it had previously offered far too many charging product models — around a hundred power bank SKUs in 2024 — and plans to cut that number by 50-70%.
Anker is internally known for holding regular "suicide workshops" — sessions where the company deliberately maps out how its own current products might eventually become obsolete and plans new categories in advance. Yang's power bank prediction appears to be a public extension of that same forward-looking, self-disruptive mindset — though it comes at a moment when the company is also pursuing a Hong Kong listing partly to shore up cash flow strained by the recalls.
#Anker #安克创新 #SteveYang #PowerBank #ConsumerElectronics #EnergyStorage #ChinaTech #TechBusiness #HomeSolar #ProductStrategy #ChinaStartups #TechCEO