Hexing Brand Guidelines: The 1992 Hangzhou Meter Maker Behind the Orca Platforms

From an instrument factory to a meter company.

Hexing Electrical is a meter and power-equipment maker based in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province in eastern China. The company dates its start to 1992, and a research report on the firm published by Guosen Securities on 2 September 2024 gives the same year. The report fills in the corporate line behind it: the direct predecessor was Hexing Electric, set up in 1998 with Zhou Liangzhang, now chairman, as its initiator and controlling shareholder. After several integrations and share transfers, Zhou and Li Xiaoqing, now vice-chairman, held all of the company between them by 2009, the report says.

Both founders came from the local instrument trade. Guosen says Zhou and Li each worked at the Hangzhou Instrument Factory in the 1990s, and that Zhou has spent more than thirty years in the power industry. The report names a holding company, Hexing Holdings, as the controlling shareholder with just under half of the listed company’s shares, and describes Zhou as its controlling shareholder and the listed group’s actual controller.

Hexing grew up in a crowded home market. The English Wikipedia article on the smart grid in China, citing a 2011–2012 industry report by Research in China, lists Hangzhou Hexing Electrical seventh among the ten largest winners of the first four State Grid smart-meter biddings of 2011, with a share of just under four percent. In November 2016 the company listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange under the code 603556, according to the CB Insights company profile. Its headquarters remain in Hangzhou, in the Shangcheng Industrial Zone, the same profile says.

Meters, modules and the Orca software.

The core of the business is electricity metering. Hexing’s own site describes single-phase and three-phase smart meters for prepaid and postpaid billing, with radio, power-line, cellular and NB-IoT communications, plus data concentrators, collectors and head-end systems that gather readings for a utility. It also lists water meters for automatic and remote reading and prepaid supply, and special metering devices, and it describes a prepaid smart gas-meter project for a gas utility in Bangladesh. A certificate from the DLMS User Association, the Zug-based association that tests meters against the DLMS/COSEM standard, records that a Hexing electricity meter, the HXE130, passed its conformance tests in December 2017.

Networks came next. In April 2020 eeNews Europe reported that the “Chinese smartmeter maker Hexing” was using Arm’s Pelion device-management technology together with Wi-SUN mesh radio links, aiming at markets in Europe, South East Asia, India and South America. The article quoted chairman Zhou Liangzhang on bringing the Pelion platform into Hexing’s smart-metering products and its Orca applications, so that meters could be maintained and updated over the air. The company’s site now groups its software under the Orca name, with separate platforms for advanced metering infrastructure, for billing and trading, and for network operations.

Wi-SUN remains central to how the company presents itself abroad. On its site Hexing describes a Wi-SUN advanced metering project for a Brazilian power company that, the company says, covers more than 100 cities and more than 1.3 million installed smart meters, using a 4G and Wi-SUN design. Guosen’s 2024 report shows the range spreading beyond meters into the distribution grid: ring main units, pole-mounted switches, single- and three-phase reclosers, automation cabinets and prefabricated substations for solar and wind plants. The report notes contract wins for reclosers in Brazil and for ring main units in Africa.

Meters, networks and dashboards.

Utility meters are everywhere and rarely looked at. They sit in cupboards and basements, in pits under the pavement and in boxes on outside walls, and today they are read far more often by machines than by people. The makers in this guide build electricity, water, gas and heat meters, and increasingly the radio networks and software that collect and manage their readings.

Their imagery follows that shift. Factory photographs show rows of grey and white meters clamped into test rigs, brass water-meter bodies waiting for assembly and the dials of mechanical registers. Newer material shows small digital displays and communication modules, and control-room screens where a utility follows consumption, outages and the state of its network across a town or a region. Product shots tend to sit on plain light backgrounds, close in spirit to the technical drawings of a catalogue.

People appear mostly as installers and operators: field engineers beside liveried utility vans, technicians opening a meter cabinet or lifting the lid of a water-meter pit, staff in front of dashboards. Trade fairs such as Enlit, where the power industry meets, and national utility shows are where these companies present themselves to their customers, and their stands lean on the same mix of hardware, maps and screens.

Ownership in the sector has changed often, with listed groups, private equity investors and family firms buying and selling meter businesses across borders. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Local teams, new energy and boats.

Much of Hexing’s own site is about its overseas reach. The company says it serves more than 110 countries and regions, runs 17 manufacturing centres around the world, and that more than 40 percent of its staff are international; its site names local teams in Romania, Poland, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil. Guosen’s September 2024 report gave a figure of about 90 countries and regions for its product sales, and said the company was building new local operations in Europe, Latin America and Africa: a European factory had completed trial production, a factory in Mexico was under construction and planning had begun for a new joint-venture plant in Africa.

The newer lines sit under separate names. Guosen lists chargers, inverters, commercial and industrial energy storage, solar kits and microgrid systems among its new-energy products, sold both through local channel partners and as engineering, procurement and construction projects. On its site Hexing presents these under the Livoltek name, and describes a microgrid project in Eswatini built with Livoltek grid-tied inverters, storage and energy-management software. It also lists water treatment and seawater desalination equipment, smart street lights and controllers, and electric outboard and pod drives for small boats, including a project supplying electric outboards to fishing communities in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. The company describes its aim as becoming a solutions expert in green energy and clean water.

Trade fairs remain part of the picture. In October 2026 Hexing announced that it would exhibit smart-grid and AI-driven energy-management solutions at Enlit Europe 2026, the utility trade fair. Its site sets that news alongside pages on its Belt and Road work and a line that sums up how it describes itself: “Hexing belongs to China, and to the world.”

For a design guide, Hexing shows a Chinese meter maker whose plain name now covers meters, grid hardware, software platforms and solar products sold under a second brand. Compare Secure Meters, the Indian meter maker from Udaipur, and Landis+Gyr, the Swiss meter maker that passed through a long chain of owners. For this guide we use a deep teal, a terminal grey and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hexing’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.