power banks are going to die

If you have ever thought about buying a powerbank on portals like Amazon, it is more than likely that you have come across the Anker brand. It is a Chinese brand founded in 2011 by a former Google software engineer, currently divided between three pillars: Anker (batteries and chargers), Soundcore (audio) and Eufy (smart home). The company knows very well how to make money and what products will survive the future. Powerbanks seem not to be one of them.

The statements. Yang Meng, CEO of Anker, recently declared in an interview that portable batteries will not be one of the most profitable product categories in the coming years. In fact, he let it slip that “they could disappear in a few years.”

“Consumer electronics are actually products that come and go quickly. For example, if you bought an MP3 player, chances are you also bought a cassette player or a CD player. The time lag between initially purchasing these products and abandoning their purchase is only about 10 years.”

Yang Meng has compared power banks to dead and buried product categories, such as MP3tapes cassette and CDs. In short, they are understood as a temporary product category.

Realistic? Yes. The powerbank lived its golden age between 2012 and 2022, beginning to plummet in the last three years. Market projections point to increasingly slower growth, with the emergence of silicon-carbon batteries as one of the main changes in the industry.

Because. Yang’s statements have some trapand Anker has gone from being a portable battery company to a giant in categories such as sound. In 2024, Anker had 100 different powerbank models, an uncontrollable saturation for a product category that is no longer the company’s economic engine.

Anker is focusing on designing its own chips for its sound products, with the aim of positioning its audio products in the top category.

The master plan. The plan fits with a change in philosophy that Yang himself summarizes with an internal label: going from being a “series 5 company” to a “series 7 company” (in Anker’s internal nomenclature, the categories range from 1 to 7, with 7 being the maximum). For a decade, Anker dedicated itself to making affordable and outstanding quality-price products, above some of its direct rivals and noticeably cheaper than more premium brands.

Now they want to compete directly against the leaders of each category—Apple’s AirPods—with high-end products and prices that allow them to increase the company’s net profit.

Between the lines. The man who built a multi-million dollar empire selling portable batteries is now the one dropping his death sentence. But reading Yang’s words, curiously, has less to do with whether or not powerbanks disappear as a profitable product category: they have to do with the direction of the market.

In the case of Anker, powerbanks are no longer a future category as profitable as its other pillars. Something that is not a real translation of the fact that the powerbank market is collapsing, despite the containment of its growth. Now, if the norm in the short term ends up being silicon-carbon, the average user will have very few reasons to carry a powerbank.

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