By Youdian Marks | Author: Mint

“Does this have 3C certification?” Open any power bank product page on Taobao, and the most common question in the comments section is no longer “Is the capacity inflated?” — it’s this one.

Recently, every business traveler has picked up a new habit: flip over your power bank and check for the 3C mark. If it’s there? Call the airline to see if it’s allowed on the plane. If not? Order a new one immediately.

Starting around June last year, with Romoss’s spontaneous combustion incidents as a trigger, anxiety over power bank safety spread rapidly across the entire industry. Since then, turning a power bank over to inspect its back has become a reflex.

Nearly a year later, Romoss has quietly faded. Visit its official flagship store: the homepage is unmaintained, and under the few remaining charging cables, the Q&A section is packed with questions like: “Buy a cable and get a bomb as a gift?” “Has the recalled power bank been refunded? It’s been almost a year and no news.”

So what about other brands? Have they learned their lesson?

Some keep going, some fall

Recently released 2025 annual reports have revealed part of the mystery.

Let’s start with Anker. In 2025, its charging and energy storage revenue reached 15.4 billion yuan, up 21.59% year-on-year. What supports this figure is no longer power banks. Anker CEO Steven Yang once said that power bank revenue accounted for less than 12% in 2024. The real growth comes from residential photovoltaics and balcony energy storage — the Anker SOLIX series sells very well in Europe.

The power bank crisis also dragged Anker down: the company launched three batches of recalls during the year, with some estimates putting the recall cost at hundreds of millions of yuan. But diversified businesses saved it. Smart innovation and smart audiovisual products together contributed nearly half of its revenue, both growing over 20%. The power bank crisis didn’t kill Anker; instead, it accelerated Anker’s shift away from relying on power banks.

Now look at Ugreen. In 2025, revenue reached 9.491 billion yuan, a sharp increase of 53.83%, while net profit rose 52%. The fastest-growing segment was not chargers, but smart storage — revenue soared 213%, and NAS private cloud became its new ace in the hole.

The power bank crisis did hit Ugreen as well: gross margin for charging-related products fell slightly, inventory climbed to 2 billion yuan, and operating cash flow turned negative. However, Ugreen quickly adjusted: on one hand, it stabilized its core charging business with new national standard products; on the other, it aggressively pushed into NAS and smart office. Today, its charging business has dropped from an absolute mainstay to about 45% of revenue, while NAS is emerging as a second growth curve.

Other brands have also swiftly pivoted in the wake of the crisis.

Baseus timed the release of the new national standard perfectly, rolling out the first batch of compliant products and obtaining a China Space-certified laboratory seal. At the same time, its ambitions are no longer limited to power banks — it aims to extend safety capabilities from a single brick to the entire home, via GaN fast charging, full-scene connectivity devices, and smart audio.

Even Xiaomi launched six new national standard power banks in April, starting at 199 yuan, with the 3C logo moved to the most visible spot on the side. But for Xiaomi, power banks have never been the main business — they are just one piece of its smartphone ecosystem puzzle.

In short, the brands that survived no longer rely solely on power banks for their livelihood.

And at the epicenter of the storm — Romoss, once the top seller on Tmall for ten consecutive years — has fallen.

Search for “Romoss” on Taobao, and only charging cables and plugs appear. Its official flagship store homepage is unmaintained, and clicking on any product page redirects to a few cable listings. On social media, former employees express their regret over its decline. One store using a name that vaguely resembles Romoss, when asked “Is it 3C certified? Is it really Romoss?” replied: “Romoss has quality safety issues; the brand factory has gone out of business.”

It’s not an isolated case. The root of the power bank crisis lies with upstream OEMs, and countless businesses have been affected. Industry estimates suggest that nearly 70% of existing production capacity will be eliminated, meaning many no-name power banks will disappear from the market.

A painful lesson

How did Romoss end up here?

A late-2025 notice from the State Administration for Market Regulation made it clear: Romoss, in an effort to cut production costs, manufactured and sold power banks without mandatory certification, skimping on quality investment. This reflects lax quality control, failure to uphold principal responsibility, and the industry’s vicious cycle of valuing volume over quality — low price, low quality, cutthroat competition.

In plain words: to save money, they saved on safety. Its supplier, AMPRIUS, outsourced production to contract manufacturers, who in turn switched to cheap, low-quality separator materials to cut costs.

The incident also exposed flaws in the certification process. In October 2025, AMPRIUS was listed as a judgment debtor, with an enforcement target of 2.99 million yuan. Even certification bodies failed: Vkan Certification was fined 100,000 yuan for failing to effectively track and inspect AMPRIUS’s products. Some industry insiders say that for a small fee, a consulting company can help even a clerical worker produce internal documents to pass 3C certification — easier than ISO.

The truth is, Romoss wasn’t alone in cutting corners. When companies relentlessly drive down prices, suppliers dare to cheat on materials; when certification bodies look the other way, substandard products get certified and reach consumers. What eventually explodes in consumers’ hands is not just a power bank, but the entire industry’s credibility.

The crisis left the industry with two hard lessons.

Lesson one: The low price bought by sacrificing safety will eventually be paid back with interest. It took Romoss a decade to climb to the top of sales, and only one year to crash and burn. Its supplier AMPRIUS was fined and listed as a judgment debtor; the certification body Vkan was publicly named and fined; and Romoss itself not only saw brand damage and employee departures, but also warehouses full of unsold power banks and cables.

Lesson two: The power bank industry has almost no moat. The top five global power bank companies together hold only about 18% of the market — extremely fragmented and fiercely competitive. At the same time, technological barriers are nearly nonexistent; fast-charging technology quickly becomes shared across the industry. From an industrial perspective, upstream cell and circuit board suppliers are highly mature, and downstream products are functionally homogeneous.

Last year’s crisis made everyone realize that this is not a great business. Those who survived basically all understood this.

Some have used it as a springboard to pivot to other areas: Anker is focusing on residential solar and balcony energy storage; Ugreen is aggressively expanding into smart storage, shifting from selling accessories to selling data solutions. Others, like Xiaomi and Huawei, never treated power banks as their main business — instead, they are just a piece of the smartphone ecosystem: indispensable, but never relied upon.

Romoss’s fall forced every player to answer a question: what is a power bank, really? Don’t tie your life to a power bank. That is the true lesson the industry learned after Romoss collapsed.

Ripples of the shockwave

The power bank story is not unique.

Long-term apartment rentals, e-cigarettes, medical aesthetics — all have followed a similar path: unbridled growth, low-price competition, frequent safety incidents, regulatory crackdowns, industry shakeouts. The script is strikingly similar.

The common pattern across these industries is that when price wars are pushed to the extreme, safety and quality are always the first to be sacrificed. And consumers always end up paying the price. Among Romoss’s users, some have posted that they finally received refunds for recalled products, but many more are still waiting.

In April this year, the mandatory national standard “Safety Technical Specification for Mobile Power Banks” was officially released. The new standard has been called the “strictest ever”: cells must pass a nail penetration test; thermal abuse temperature has been raised from 130°C to 135°C, with the duration extended to 60 minutes; the shell must clearly indicate a “recommended safe service life” so that consumers know when to dispose of the device…

Many worry about the costs to come. According to industry research firm LuotuoTech, after the new standard is implemented, power bank prices are expected to rise between 15% and 30%. However, several companies have stated that they will absorb cost pressures through technical optimization, supply chain integration, and economies of scale, and that prices for some basic models may remain stable.

The ripples of that storm are still spreading. Yet, undeniably, things are moving in a better direction.