Penetrating the 500-page prospectus of Delan Minghai, analyzing its competitive potential and growth gaps | Exclusive

How did Delan Minghai transform from an OEM into a unicorn in energy storage?

From a small OEM factory with an initial registered capital of 1 million yuan, Delan Minghai has grown into a unicorn company, ranking in the top 4 in the global user-side energy storage sector, a journey that took approximately 13 years.

The 24潮产业研究院 (TTIR) dissected its growth history and found that through forward-looking strategic layout, strong strategic execution, and a visionary global industrial and R&D system, Delan Minghai has successfully established a unique competitive advantage in the industry.

According to the prospectus, by the end of 2025, Delan Minghai has obtained 847 effective patents globally, with products sold to over 120 countries and regions, and a cumulative shipment of more than 3.5 million energy storage products worldwide.

However, facing global trade wars, fierce industry competition, high sales expenses, and insolvency risks (with a debt-to-asset ratio exceeding 100%), the pressures and cracks behind its rapid growth have become evident.

With the disclosure of Delan Minghai’s Hong Kong IPO prospectus, the mysterious veil of this household storage unicorn is slowly being lifted.

Delan Minghai’s starting point bears the typical mark of early hard tech entrepreneurship in Shenzhen. In its early years, it OEM’d for major brands like Anker Innovations and Belkin, allowing Delan Minghai to undergo rigorous quality control training and develop a deep understanding of overseas markets. Throughout its journey, its forward-looking and pragmatic understanding of industry and company development has been a notable characteristic of Delan Minghai.

While many OEM factories were still lingering in their comfort zones, Delan Minghai sensed that the global energy storage market would shift from “policy-driven” to “market-driven” in the face of a sudden pandemic. Thus, in 2020, Delan Minghai made a daring leap from OEM to its own brand.

Although a latecomer, Delan Minghai started with two product lines of “portable + home use,” leveraging its deep R&D foundation to continuously iterate and introduce higher-priced products. While enjoying the high growth dividends of the overseas portable energy storage market, Delan Minghai quietly extended its reach into the home energy storage sector, which has higher average prices and stronger user loyalty.

The prospectus shows that in the first three quarters of 2023, 2024, and 2025, Delan Minghai’s overall gross profit margins were 35.58%, 37.31%, and 42.29%, showing a strong and continuous growth trend. Its overall profitability level is now just a step away from industry leader Anker Innovations (44.68%), having surpassed another competitor, Hua Bao New Energy (39.68%).

From a corporate profitability perspective, although Delan Minghai is still in a stage of continuous losses (with losses of 184 million yuan, 47 million yuan, and 28 million yuan for the first three quarters of 2023-2025), the scale of losses is continuously decreasing. In fact, when observing from the perspective of commonly used international metrics of core operational capability, such as EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) and EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), Delan Minghai is expected to turn profitable in 2024; for instance, EBIT for that year is projected to be 18.95 million yuan, further increasing to 43.77 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2025.

Relying on forward-looking layout and industry insight, Delan Minghai has rapidly grown, entered the industry’s top tier, and continuously moved toward profitability, allowing it to better withstand fluctuations in a single market while seeking new growth curves and challenging brand heights.

Currently, Delan Minghai has firmly secured the fourth position in the global portable energy storage market. From 2023 to 2025, the BLUETTI brand has consistently maintained a top two global average search popularity in the portable energy storage category on Google Trends. Behind these numbers is a complete methodology that Delan Minghai has built in its global layout.

Delan Minghai’s globalization is not just about “selling products”; through forward-looking deep operations, it aims to establish a moat of brand, channel, and experience that is difficult to replicate.

When launching its own brand, the company strategically built a DTC sales network centered around independent sites, reducing excessive reliance on third-party platforms like Amazon, thereby gaining valuable pricing power, user data, and brand relationships. In 2024, 25.2% of the company’s online revenue came from its independent website, increasing to 30.4% in the first three quarters of 2025, which is quite remarkable in the industry.

In terms of brand building, Delan Minghai is also forward-looking, not only adopting crowdfunding as a standard path for product launches but also collaborating deeply with KOLs in vertical fields to shape brand tone for the new generation. In addition to focusing online, Delan Minghai has entered mainstream offline retail giants in Europe and America like Costco, Walmart, and Home Depot, accelerating brand building while achieving omni-channel integration to cover a broader consumer base. Behind the over 22% revenue growth in 2024, offline revenue growth of 29% surpassed online’s 18%, demonstrating a healthy pattern of online and offline collaborative development.

It is worth mentioning that, having started as an OEM, Delan Minghai deeply understands the importance of user experience. Mature markets like Europe and America place particular emphasis on service. The company not only formed localized global service teams but also designated customer service and support personnel. By the end of the first three quarters of 2025, in addition to sales employees, the company had 94 dedicated customer service and support staff, accounting for 5.7% of its workforce. The company’s main products also include thoughtful features such as support for wireless diagnostics and online alerts and updates, allowing users to solve various issues remotely, enhancing user experience through product and service synergy.

In this global layout, unlike Hua Bao New Energy and Anker Innovations, which saw inventory increases alongside revenue growth, Delan Minghai’s revenue also experienced double-digit growth in 2024, but its inventory significantly decreased from 904 million yuan to 618 million yuan, demonstrating improved inventory management while showcasing enhanced sales efficiency and faster product delivery.

Having long engaged in OEM, Delan Minghai has also shown rare foresight and pragmatism in R&D innovation.

Despite starting late and being smaller in scale, Delan Minghai has not hesitated to invest real money into R&D, with the intensity of R&D investment continuously increasing in recent years. In 2023, R&D investment reached 128 million yuan, accounting for 7.18% of revenue. In 2024, R&D investment increased to 138 million yuan, and in the first three quarters of 2025, R&D investment was 129 million yuan, with the proportion of revenue rising to 8.18%.

Both the scale of R&D investment and its proportion of operating revenue have surpassed the larger competitor Hua Bao New Energy (with R&D investment of 122 million yuan and a proportion of 4.15% for the first three quarters of 2025), with the proportion of R&D investment approaching that of Anker Innovations (9.26%).

Supported by continuous R&D investment, the resulting patent achievements are also the foundation of Delan Minghai’s sustained competition and growth. By the end of 2025, the company holds 847 effective patents, particularly 308 invention patents, accounting for over one-third. In contrast, Hua Bao New Energy has only 90 invention patents as of the end of September 2025.

The forward-looking continuous increase in R&D and efficient pragmatic R&D work has led to ongoing technological and product innovation and iteration, forming the basis for Delan Minghai’s current and future competitiveness, greatly assisting the company in coping with fierce industry competition and helping it maintain its profitability.

Data provides the most favorable evidence. For instance, in 2024, Delan Minghai’s ROE (return on equity) after deducting non-recurring items (diluted) was 28.30%, while Hua Bao New Energy’s was 2.58% and Anker Innovations’ was 21.07%. A higher non-recurring ROE indicates that a company is more efficient in obtaining returns from its net assets, also reflecting better quality of net asset returns.

However, given the rapid iteration of current energy storage technologies, intense market and price competition, and dramatic changes in the external policy environment, the road ahead for Delan Minghai is still challenging.

For example, in the portable energy storage sector, competitors like Zhenghao Innovations, Hua Bao New Energy, and Anker Innovations have captured around half of the global market share. Although the company is growing rapidly, it is still a latecomer and relatively small in size, meaning it needs not only more operational wisdom but also to invest more funds in R&D and sales to catch up and close the gap with strong competitors’ brand and scale advantages, especially since competitors are not “lying flat.”

According to 24潮产业研究院 (TTIR), the sales expense ratio for Delan Minghai reached 30.53% in the first three quarters of 2025, a year-on-year increase of 5.17%. Both figures exceeded those of Anker Innovations (sales expense ratio of 22.36%, year-on-year growth of 0.40%) and Hua Bao New Energy (sales expense ratio of 27.92%, year-on-year decrease of 0.03%). This indicates that the company is investing more sales resources than competitors to ensure continuous revenue growth.

Interestingly, Hua Bao New Energy, which compressed its sales expenses in the first three quarters of 2025, achieved a revenue growth of 37.95%, which is even about 15 percentage points higher than that of Delan Minghai. How to seek a better balance between sales investment and revenue growth will be a key factor for Delan Minghai to achieve profitability in the future.

It is important to note that the portable energy storage track has become a red ocean. With key technologies like batteries and chips reaching a phase of relative stability, and the prospects for solid-state batteries still unclear, as well as no key breakthroughs in smart portable energy storage, price competition is likely inevitable. Delan Minghai, with persistently high sales expenses, is showing adverse signs in the core portable energy storage business revenue; in the first three quarters of 2025, both revenue and gross profit from portable energy storage products slightly declined year-on-year, with the gross profit margin only increasing by 0.6 percentage points, compared to an increase of 6.2 percentage points in 2024.

The home energy storage product sector, as the company’s second growth curve, may also face side attacks. For example, Anker Innovations has launched the Solarbank series of balcony solar storage products in Europe, its second largest market, increasing the self-use rate of photovoltaic energy from 40% to 90%, directly addressing European households’ demands to “save on electricity bills.” Once introduced to North America, Japan, and other regions, it will become a strong competitor to the company’s home energy storage products.

Although Delan Minghai’s products are primarily consumer-grade energy storage products, given the energy attributes, networking, and intelligence trends of energy storage, as well as the advantages of China’s energy storage industry, it is not ruled out that the U.S. and others may increase trade suppression in the future, particularly in the home energy storage sector, due to the need to suppress China’s key advantageous industries and concerns over so-called information security. For example, the U.S. recently proposed the CHARGE Act, aiming to prohibit the import of certain energy storage systems with remote monitoring, cloud updates, or real-time data return capabilities, including normal operational features such as OTA cloud upgrades, remote diagnostics, and real-time data return.

What Delan Minghai needs to be most cautious about is the significant operational and financial pressure that comes from high debt levels, which cannot be underestimated, as it has not yet made the risky leap from the brink of profitability to actual profitability. From 2023 to the first three quarters of 2025, the debt-to-asset ratio has consistently remained above 100% and shows an upward trend, reaching 106.62% by the end of September 2025, while Anker Innovations and Hua Bao New Energy have debt-to-asset ratios of only 49.52% and 17.28%, respectively.

More severely, the proportion of current liabilities has notably increased, rising from 36.56% in 2023 to 45.83% by the end of September 2025, with the amount increasing from 860 million yuan to 1.39 billion yuan. Among the 1.39 billion yuan in current liabilities, short-term loans reached 436 million yuan, with total payables as high as 882 million yuan. By January 15, 2026, the company’s payables surged to 1.16 billion yuan.

This means that the company needs a large amount of working capital to maintain operations and avoid falling into a funding shortfall due to short-term debts.

In addition, it is worth noting that over 90% of Delan Minghai’s non-current liabilities, amounting to 1.55 billion yuan, are related to equity redemption liabilities. Equity redemption liabilities are common among companies going public in Hong Kong and are similar to debt incurred from equity financing in the A-share market due to listing gambling, usually incurring corresponding interest expenses.

From 2023 to the end of September 2025, the interest expenses paid on equity redemption liabilities for Delan Minghai reached 67.28 million yuan, 66.72 million yuan, and 51.76 million yuan, respectively, further raising the company’s debt-to-asset ratio and consuming its profits.

In fact, the losses that Delan Minghai has incurred in recent years are significantly attributed to the high interest expenses on equity redemption liabilities.

Under high debt ratios and financial pressure, even though Delan Minghai’s performance is improving, some key indicators show a continuous decline in its debt repayment ability, with the current ratio dropping from 2.22 to 1.64. Fortunately, it remains above 1, but the quick ratio has fallen from 1.17 to 0.98, which is below 1, indicating that the company’s short-term liquid assets can no longer cover its current liabilities, typically a significant signal of weak short-term debt repayment ability, with potential financial risks emerging.

Of course, considering that Delan Minghai had 900 million yuan in inventory at the same time, if the company’s operations are normal, the debt risk exposure remains within a controllable range.

Energy storage, being a capital-intensive industry with extremely high safety attributes, tests the cyclical survival capabilities of all companies within the industry in today’s fierce competition and deep internal competition. As an emerging player in the industry, Delan Minghai shines in the industry and capital market with its unique product strength and methodology, but the outcome of its charge into the Hong Kong stock market remains uncertain. With intensified industry competition, this unicorn still needs time and performance to validate its ability to navigate through cycles.