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, generally described as founded by engineers who came out of BBK — though the founder's own account of the founding names no former employer. 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 interview makes that gap sharper rather than smaller: across fifteen questions the founder discusses the company's origins, the choice of its name, its brand ladder and its product plans in specifics, and never once gives a personal name [2].

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, and it is worse than it first appeared. A stock quote circulates for "飞傲国际" under ticker 869468, which looks like a listed FiiO. An earlier version of this entry said that code belonged to Fuzhou FiiO International Trading Co., Ltd. That identification could not be confirmed on re-checking, and the company is wrong for the role anyway: Fuzhou FiiO International Trading is a clothing and general-merchandise trader, a limited liability company rather than a listed one, with no equity or personnel connection to the Guangzhou business. Investigating the code turned up a third unrelated firm, Shanghai FiiO International Freight Forwarding Co., Ltd., a freight forwarder. "飞傲国际" is simply a common enough construction that several industries have used it.

The practical rule: no confirmed stock code exists for Guangzhou FiiO Electronics Technology, and any code circulating with the name should be treated as belonging to something else until a filing proves otherwise. The registry row for this entry carries no listing at all, which is correct.

From accessories to audio

"I realized my retirement plan before the age of 35 and enjoyed a relaxed life for a period. Later, one of my friends invited me to work as a consultant in his company. During this period, I noticed the global popularity of iPods and the Meizu M6 player. Therefore, I proposed to the company to develop a docking speaker for the M6, and later went to Meizu company to talk over with them. We thus agreed to cooperate. However, Meizu decided to cancel the project, leaving my friend's company with a lot of stock. To prevent waste and loss, and help my friend, I decided to start my own company and market the product myself." [2]

FiiO is generally described as having been founded by engineers who had worked at BBK, the Chinese consumer-electronics group. The founder's own account of the founding, given to TechPowerUp in 2024, is different and more specific, and it is worth setting out because it does not mention BBK at all:

That is a first-party account from the founder, and it describes the company as starting from a cancelled accessory project and unsold inventory rather than from a deliberate move away from a former employer. The two stories are not necessarily incompatible — a consultancy at a consumer-electronics firm could sit inside the BBK orbit, and BBK and Meizu were rivals in the portable-player market — but the specific claim that FiiO was founded to avoid competing with a former employer is not supported by the founder's own telling [2][5].

On the name, the founder is explicit that it runs English-first: "The brand name 'FiiO' combines 'Fi' (from Hi-Fi's Fi) and 'iO' (representing digital 1 & 0)... The Chinese pronunciation of 'FiiO' closely resembles '飞傲.' That's how we got the Chinese name." [2] The Chinese name, in other words, was chosen to match the English one rather than the reverse — which is the opposite of how most Chinese consumer brands of the period were named.

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 [2][6]. The founder names the E3 as the product he is most attached to from the company's first five years, and says of it that "when we developed the E3, there were no similar products to reference" [2].

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 founder has stated the positioning as a single ladder: "FiiO: Targeted at professional mid-to-high-end HiFi audio products. JadeAudio: Positioned for high performance-cost HiFi audio products. Snowsky: Positioned for trendy and youthful audio products." [2] On JadeAudio specifically he is blunter about the mechanism than the marketing language suggests — "JadeAudio focuses on high cost-performance, and takes direct sales as the main sales strategy" [2].

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.

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More from the files

Sources

  1. About FIIO — FiiO (2026-09-19)
  2. Interview with James Chung (FiiO Founder) — TechPowerUp (2026-09-19) ↩
  3. FiiO industrial park and factory tour — TechPowerUp (2026-09-19)
  4. 广州飞傲电子科技有限公司 — company profile — 启信宝 (via qichaxun) (2026-09-19) ↩
  5. 飞傲：白云区的音频企业 — states the founding team came out of BBK, and quotes general manager 陈俊铭 — 广州白云发布 (Guangzhou Baiyun district) (2026-09-19) ↩
  6. 耳边谈：飞傲创始人访谈 — 什么值得买 (2026-09-19) ↩
  7. 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) ↩
  8. 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) ↩
  9. How Chi-Fi is re-energizing the audiophile hobby — FutureAudiophile (2026-09-19)
  10. FiiO — Wikipedia (2026-09-19)
  11. FIIO Electronicsと株式会社エミライ、戦略的パートナーシップ協定を締結 — names "CEO 鐘 志宏, English name: James Zhong" — FiiO Japan (Emilai) (2026-10-12)
  12. 飞傲电子与Emilai达成战略合作伙伴关系 — the Chinese-language release of the same partnership — FiiO (2026-10-12)
  13. BBK (electronics enterprise) — the 1999 three-way split and the 2023 deregistration — Wikipedia (2026-10-12)