Onyx BOOX: From Guangzhou OEM Workshop to World's No. 2 E-Paper Brand, 61-Year-Old Female Founder Files for HKEX IPO

Origin

Tan Yuting graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University in 1990. After cutting her teeth in the IT distribution industry and earning her first pot of gold, she transitioned into hardware OEM manufacturing. In 2008, she founded the Onyx brand in Guangzhou. At the time, Amazon Kindle was sparking a global e-reader boom, and a massive influx of Chinese manufacturers were entering the white-label and OEM space. She recognized that while e-paper was a niche market, its screenless design, eye-protection features, and long battery life constituted irreplaceable, essential needs for heavy readers. Meanwhile, Amazon Kindle's closed ecosystem left an opening for differentiated e-readers running an open Android system, leading her to adopt a dual-track strategy of building an independent brand combined with an open system.

Milestones

Turning Points

• In 2008, abandoned white-label OEM to launch the independent brand BOOX and bet on the open Android system, competing through differentiation against Kindle's closed ecosystem.
• Reformed its practices after facing a reputational crisis in overseas developer communities due to GPL open-source compliance issues, forcing the company to establish a compliant open-source R&D workflow.
• Around 2016, took the lead in cutting into large-size handwriting e-paper tablets, upgrading products from e-readers into productivity tools, driving both average order value and user stickiness higher.
• Actively absorbed legacy users after Kindle's exit from China in 2023, scaling up both domestic and overseas lines simultaneously, with revenue surpassing 1.0 billion RMB.
• Filed for an HKEX IPO in 2026, transitioning from a low-key hidden champion to subjecting itself to capital market scrutiny.

Failures & Pitfalls

• When entering overseas markets early on, failure to fully comply with the GPL open-source license by disclosing system source codes led to boycotts by overseas developer communities, temporarily damaging brand reputation.
• The domestic e-book market was long squeezed by iReader, Hanwang, and low-cost white-label devices. Onyx's domestic sales struggled for years, forcing it to place its focus overseas and creating a high degree of dependence on European and American markets.
• The e-paper category has a clear ceiling. Even as the world's second-largest consumer market player, 2024 shipments were only around 200,000 units, compelling the company to expand categories through tablet-ization and colorization to break growth bottlenecks.
• Market response fell short of expectations when attempting new product lines like e-paper monitors and smartphone devices. Some products received critical acclaim without translating into mass sales, indicating that niche geek word-of-mouth is difficult to convert directly into mainstream volume.

Core Data

• 年营收2024：Approximately 1.0 billion RMB (public disclosure basis, independent verification unverified)
• 海外收入占比2024：Close to 60% (public disclosure basis, independent verification unverified)
• 覆盖国家地区数：Over 100 (public disclosure basis, independent verification unverified)
• 年出货量2024：Approximately 200,000 units (public disclosure basis, independent verification unverified)
• 消费级墨水屏全球排名：Global No. 2 (public disclosure basis, independent verification unverified)
• 创立年份：2008 (public disclosure basis)
• 创始人学历：Graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University in 1990 (public disclosure basis, independent verification unverified)
• 上市保荐人：China Securities International (submitted HKEX main board application in January 2026) (public disclosure basis, independent verification unverified)

Competitors / Peers

The global consumer e-paper market players are highly concentrated: Amazon Kindle remains the largest shipment vendor thanks to its content ecosystem, though it exited the Chinese market in 2023, leaving a channel void; Japan's Sony exited and then returned to the e-paper market, focusing on large-size professional devices; domestic player iReader subsidizes hardware with its content platform, while Hanwang focuses on handwriting recognition and office notebooks, with both attacking the domestic market at lower price points; Huawei entered the high-end market with the 2022 launch of the MatePad Paper, and Xiaomi's ecosystem also features low-cost products. Onyx targets open systems and large-screen writing professionals, competing in a differentiated manner against all these players. However, this is also the fundamental opponent of its revenue ceiling being constrained by category scale—the annual scale of the entire consumer e-paper market is far smaller than that of the mainstream tablet market.