The factories that helped build these products are now buying the brands outright
A familiar logo on a speaker or headphone no longer tells the full story. Marcus, a long time organizer of China’s largest hi fi exhibitions, has seen how ownership behind these brands has quietly changed over decades.
Many heritage Western names are now owned by Chinese companies with deep manufacturing roots. These moves rarely made headlines, but together undoubtedly changed the industry.
Ownership, production, and brand identity are no longer aligned the way they once were. To see how this happened, it helps to follow the deals that built this shift.
Does China Really Make 80%?
Marcus argues that China dominates global audio manufacturing.
He attributes that dominance to the Pearl River and Yangtze River Deltas, which he says form ‘a complete production chain’ for acoustics, with clusters in Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Ningbo producing everything from wireless earbuds to precision drivers.
Enping, a single Guangdong city designated the “City of Microphones,” hosts more than 400 audio manufacturers by itself.
Marcus’s number isn’t fantasy. OEM components assembled by Chinese manufacturers regularly end up inside products carrying Western brand names. Drivers, amplifier boards, and capacitors from companies like Cosonic travel through global supply chains before emerging with European or American logos on the box.
Count those invisible contributions, and the gap between two-thirds and 80% narrows.
From Batteries to Beyerdynamic
The more revealing story is not how much China builds, but which brands it now owns.
Heritage British, Danish, and German audio brands have changed hands in deals that barely registered outside trade publications since the early 1990s.
The first wave came from Hong Kong, before most audiophiles were paying attention. In 1992, Gold Peak, a battery manufacturer, acquired British speaker brands KEF and Celestion. A company known for making batteries now controlled two of England’s most respected loudspeaker names.
IAG, founded by twin brothers Michael and Bernard Chang, followed a different playbook. In 1997, the company purchased Wharfedale, Leak, and Quad from the struggling Verity Group. Then it kept buying. Castle, Mission, Audiolab, and Japanese audiophile icon Luxman all entered the portfolio.
By the mid-2000s, IAG had become one of the largest owners of legacy British speaker brands.
IAG now operates a 400,000 square meter vertically integrated plant in Ji’An, China, with fifteen hundred employees producing everything from raw materials to boxed speakers under one roof.
By the 2010s, the acquisitions were no longer limited to legacy British names. Larger Chinese manufacturing groups were also moving in.
GoerTek employs roughly 37,000 people building acoustic components for phones and tablets. In December 2014, it added Dynaudio, a 37-year-old Danish company built on handcrafted drivers, to that scale.
Then a decade later, Jamo, the Danish brand founded in 1968, went to Cinemaster and Rayleigh Lab in 2024. The acquirers weren’t outsiders but insiders already embedded in the industry.
Beyerdynamic Falls, MBL Follows
This year brought the biggest names yet. The Beyerdynamic acquisition made headlines, but the manufacturing split that followed reveals the strategy. Classic and professional products will continue to be built in Germany. Select consumer lines will shift to China.
The buyer of MBL was a jewelry company. Chow Tai Seng, holding 40-50% of the global lab-grown diamond market, acquired the revered German hi-fi maker after it entered insolvency. Its subsidiary United Audio was already MBL’s Chinese distributor before the deal closed.
In each case, the pattern is similar, with distressed or underperforming heritage brands get acquired while R&D stays in the original country and manufacturing benefits from Chinese supply-chain scale.
That raises a broader question about what ‘Western brand’ still means at a hi-fi show.
The Show Floor Paradox
Marcus’s own exhibition provides the answer.
At his own show, in his own country, Western names still dominate, which shows the gap between Chinese manufacturing power and Western brand prestige.
The financial gap runs deeper than booth counts. China captured roughly 11.66% of global audio equipment revenue in 2024, according to industry estimates, despite producing the majority of the world’s product.
In short, the factory builds the speaker, but the brand captures the margin.
Marcus frames this as coexistence, not conquest.
Three Realities, One Label
Ownership, manufacturing, and brand identity now overlap in ways that were far less common a generation ago, and Marcus’s 80% figure blurs three realities that used to be separate.
Chinese companies now own heritage Western brands outright. Other Western brands depend on Chinese manufacturing without Chinese ownership. And a growing number of Chinese companies sell under their own names entirely.
Cosonic’s purchase of Beyerdynamic is the first category in its purest form. The supply chain no longer merely supports the brand layer in cases like Beyerdynamic’s. It now owns it outright.
And the next wave of acquirers won’t need a learning curve. Companies like Cosonic already know the factory floor better than the heritage brands’ original owners did, because they built the products in the first place.
Tannoy, the Scottish speaker icon, illustrates the second. The brand now ships from a 3-million-square-foot campus in Zhongshan, China. Its parent company Music Tribe is headquartered in the Philippines.
Its heritage is British, its production is in China, and its parent company is based elsewhere.
The third category consists of Chinese brands that no longer need borrowed pedigree at all.
HiFiMAN, FiiO, Shanling, and Topping sell under their own names at price points and performance tiers that didn’t exist a decade ago.
After three decades of watching the industry from the exhibition floor, Marcus sees those categories collapsing into one another.
Chinese companies now own heritage Western brands, manufacture for other Western holdouts, and compete under their own names. Yet prestige still tends to cluster around long-established Western labels.