MicroPort Brand Guidelines: Shanghai’s 1998 Stent Maker and Its Listed Family

An incubator office and a balloon catheter.

MicroPort was founded in Shanghai in 1998. English Wikipedia names its founder as Zhaohua Chang, working with a team of engineers; the company dates its founding to 15 May 1998, in a small office at an incubation centre in the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park. It says its first product, a balloon dilatation catheter for coronary angioplasty, received approval from China’s drug regulator in 1999, when it made its first sale.

Stents followed quickly. The company says its Mustang bare-metal stent was approved in China in 2000 and its Firebird drug-eluting stent in 2004, with a successor, Firebird2, approved in 2009. It moved into larger headquarters in Zhangjiang in 2001 and says it entered the Japanese market with balloon catheters in 2003.

Diversification began before the listing. MicroPort says it set up a business for diabetes products in 2008 and an orthopaedics company in Shanghai in 2009, and that its Firebird stent won a State Science and Technology Advancement Award in 2007. Aortic devices came early too: the company says its Hercule thoracic stent-graft was approved in China in 2006.

In September 2010 the parent company, MicroPort Scientific Corporation, was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, English Wikipedia says, citing the offering document published that month; the company gives the same year. Its headquarters are still in Shanghai, and the company says it also runs regional headquarters for Greater China and North America.

From stents to pacemakers and knees.

After the listing MicroPort widened its range well beyond coronary stents. In January 2014, English Wikipedia says, it bought the OrthoRecon joint-replacement business of Wright Medical, which became MicroPort Orthopedics. In the same year, the company says, its Firehawk drug-eluting stent was approved in China, followed by the CE mark in 2015, and it signed a joint-venture agreement with Sorin Group for cardiac rhythm management in China.

That link led to a larger purchase. On 30 April 2018 LivaNova announced in a news release that it had completed the sale of its Cardiac Rhythm Management business to MicroPort Scientific Corporation. MicroPort says it set up the global headquarters of MicroPort CRM in Clamart, France, that year, and English Wikipedia says it also took over the operations of the British stent-graft maker Lombard Medical in May 2018.

In the 2020s the group floated businesses with their own listings. English Wikipedia lists MicroPort Endovastec on Shanghai’s STAR Market in 2020; MicroPort CardioFlow, the heart-valve company behind the VitaFlow transcatheter aortic valves, and MicroPort MedBot, maker of the Toumai surgical robot, in Hong Kong in 2021; MicroPort NeuroTech in Hong Kong in 2022; and MicroPort EP on the STAR Market in 2022. The same article says a US regional headquarters opened in Irvine, California, in January 2022.

The 2010s also brought more buying and building at home and abroad. The company says it acquired drug-eluting stent assets and intellectual property from Cordis in 2014, set up an Indian subsidiary and an industrial park in Suzhou in 2016, established its orthopaedics headquarters in the United States in 2013 under the MicroPort Orthopedics name, and saw the first implants of its own Rega pacemakers in 2018. In 2019, it says, the Firehawk Liberty stent received the CE mark, and two-year results of its TARGET AC trial in Europe were presented at EuroPCR in Paris. In 2021 MicroPort CRM introduced the Alizea and Borea pacemakers with Bluetooth connection and a home monitor called SmartView Connect in Europe, the company says, and in 2023 it lists US approval of Alizea and Celea pacemakers.

How the category presents itself.

Cardiovascular device makers sell to a narrow audience: interventional cardiologists, electrophysiologists, cardiac surgeons, hospital buyers and regulators. Their visual language follows from that. A heart valve, a stent or a pacemaker is small, precise and usually hidden inside the body once it is in use, so the product photograph does much of the work. Valves, stents and leads tend to be shot in close-up on white or pale grey, lit to show struts, mesh and metal edges, with the device itself as the only subject.

The second register is the catheterisation laboratory. Brochures, websites and congress stands return again and again to the same scene: a patient table, a C-arm X-ray system arched over it, banks of monitors showing angiograms or mapping images, and clinicians in scrubs, lead aprons and caps. These pictures place the device in the room where it is used, without showing the patient’s body in detail.

Between the two sits illustration. Cutaway hearts, cross-sections of arteries and simplified diagrams of the conduction system explain where a valve sits, how a stent opens or how a lead reaches the heart. They are often rendered in reds and soft pinks against white, with the brand’s own colour kept for the device, the arrows and the type. Much of the copy is technical, built around product names, trial names and regulatory approvals as the companies state them.

Much of the category’s public life happens at medical congresses. TCT in the United States, EuroPCR in Paris and the ESC Congress of the European Society of Cardiology bring makers, clinicians and trade press together each year, and companies use them to show new devices and announce study results. The makers in this guide range from family-owned German engineering firms to Chinese groups with several listed subsidiaries, and their identities reflect that range more than any shared house style.

One name across a family of companies.

The name works as an umbrella. MicroPort writes it with a capital P and a registered-trademark sign, and attaches it to nearly every subsidiary: MicroPort CardioFlow, MicroPort MedBot, MicroPort Orthopedics and MicroPort CRM among them, alongside newer names such as EverPace for electrophysiology. The company says it runs research and manufacturing hubs in China, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, the UK and the Dominican Republic.

The heart businesses were reorganised in 2025. On 21 December 2025 MicroPort CardioFlow announced that it had completed a merger with MicroPort CRM, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of CardioFlow, joining valves and pacemakers in one listed company; the two businesses, the company says, now operate under a single management system. Before the merger, MicroPort CardioFlow had been listed in Hong Kong since 2021 as the group’s heart-valve business.

The group presents itself through scale and approvals rather than through a single flagship. Its history page lists regulatory approvals year by year, from China’s regulator, the European CE mark and the US Food and Drug Administration, and the company says that a MicroPort product is used somewhere in the world every few seconds.

For a design guide, MicroPort shows how one name can hold together a group of separately listed companies, from stents to robots. Compare LivaNova, which sold MicroPort its pacemaker business, and Biotronik, a family-owned pacemaker maker in Berlin. For this guide we use a deep teal, a steel grey and a red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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