Aohua Brand Guidelines: The 1994 Shanghai Endoscope Maker With Red Dot-Winning Systems

A Shanghai company built on flexible endoscopes.

Aohua is the trading name of Shanghai Aohua Photoelectricity Endoscope Co., Ltd., a maker of electronic endoscopes and endoscopic consumables based in Shanghai. The company was founded in 1994, according to both its company profile compiled from S&P Global Market Intelligence data and a November 2021 announcement by one of its investors.

That investor was Legend Capital. In its announcement, issued through ACN Newswire on 15 November 2021, Legend Capital called Aohua “one of the earliest high-tech enterprises in China” focused on the research, production and sale of endoscopes and endoscopic consumables, and quoted the company’s stated vision of “becoming the world’s leading provider of overall endoscopy solutions.” Those are the investor’s and the company’s words. The same release said Legend Capital had been the sole investor in Aohua’s Series B financing in 2014 and had co-led its Series C round in 2016, becoming its largest institutional investor. Legend Capital also wrote that Aohua had seen rapid growth in overseas sales in recent years and had broadened its product line into consumables.

The occasion for that release was the listing. On 15 November 2021 Aohua’s shares began trading on the STAR Market, the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s science and technology innovation board, under the code 688212. Legend Capital described the company as having built, over more than twenty years, a range of endoscopy products used across gastroenterology, respiratory medicine, ear, nose and throat medicine, gynaecology and emergency departments.

The listed company remains in Shanghai. Its profile, last updated in November 2026, names Xiaozhou Gu as chairman and general manager and gives a workforce of about 1,100 people.

Digestive scopes first, then new specialties.

Aohua’s business divides into equipment and consumables. The S&P-based profile describes electronic digestive endoscopes, otolaryngoscopes and endoscopic diagnosis and treatment consumables, used in respiratory medicine, general surgery, otolaryngology, orthopaedics, urology, gynaecology, gastroenterology and emergency medicine, in China and abroad.

The flexible scopes connect to video platforms sold under the AQ name. The AQ-300, a 4K ultra-high-definition endoscopy platform, received a Red Dot product design award in 2021. The Red Dot entry notes its separate control pad, which replaces conventional key-based operation, and a casing defined by “a reduction of lines.” The same year Red Dot also recognised an Aohua UHD Endoscope for the gastrointestinal tract, citing an ergonomic handle with skin-friendly and anti-slip zones and an integrated, wireless design. Both entries credit in-house design to Wang Qiubo. The jury called the AQ-300 “a working system of the future,” praising its “advanced technology and a modern, high-quality design,” and said the UHD Endoscope was “designed with a focus on the user.”

The range then spread beyond the digestive tract. An October 2024 brokerage note published by Yicai Global recorded that Aohua launched an electronic percutaneous choledochoscope and an electronic cystoscope in March 2024, taking it from gastroenterology and respiratory medicine into hepatobiliary surgery and urology, and an electronic ureteronephroscope in May 2024. In October 2024, the note said, the company released the AQ-150 Series 4K system and the AQ-120 Series, each combining the light source and the host processor in one unit.

Recognition has also come from the region. A PR Newswire release dated 29 March 2024, issued from Singapore, reported that Aohua Endoscopy won the Endoscopy Product Innovation award at the Healthcare Asia Medtech Awards 2024.

Design and documentation.

Endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery are sold to a small, expert audience: surgeons, gastroenterologists, theatre nurses and the hospital teams who buy and reprocess equipment. The makers’ public image follows from that. A familiar picture in this field is the instrument itself, a slim scope coiled on a white ground or a rigid telescope laid out at full length, shown with little else around it, so that the length, the bend and the tip carry the image.

The second familiar picture is the operating theatre. Here the product is the system rather than the single instrument: a video tower of camera units and light sources beside the table, and a team of surgeons looking up at a screen rather than down at the patient. Some makers go a step further and present the whole room; Karl Storz, for example, showed its OR1 integrated operating room at the Medica trade fair in 1998, the company says. Close by sit macro shots of instrument tips, clips and jaws, where the detail is the subject.

Much of the communication happens face to face. Makers run training and visitor centres where clinicians handle equipment and practise techniques; Karl Storz says it opened a logistics and training centre in Tuttlingen in 1999. Congresses matter as much: Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in the United States, UEG Week in Europe and the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) are where new scopes, generators and accessories are shown to the people who will use them.

The makers in this guide range from long-established German firms to younger companies elsewhere, and from full endoscope systems to single devices. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made, and it marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Housing design as part of the brand.

Aohua’s clearest design statements are its consoles. In 2026 Red Dot gave product design awards to two more Aohua systems. The AQ-150 Pro is an integrated endoscopy system that puts imaging, controls and display into a single compact unit, with the interfaces and controls arranged on the front and a display that tilts for different viewing positions. Red Dot singled out its “pared-back” housing and its clear black-and-white contrast, which gives structure to the functional areas, and the jury said the housing design and control layout “enable clear function identification and ergonomic use.”

The second, the AQ-400, is described by Red Dot as a flexible 3D 4K ultra-high-definition endoscopy system that uses two cameras to produce stereoscopic images, with hyperspectral analysis and depth-of-field expansion among its features, a long-screen display and an integrated housing. The jury pointed to the alignment of imaging and operating interface. Both 2026 entries credit an in-house design team of six, led in the listing by Qiubo Wang, the designer named on the earlier AQ-300 and UHD Endoscope awards.

Across the four Red Dot entries from 2021 and 2026, the descriptions return to the same themes: controls gathered in one place, a reduction of lines, and housings that give structure to the functional areas. Each entry names the manufacturer as Aohua Endoscopy Co., Ltd., Shanghai.

For a design guide, Aohua shows how a medical-equipment maker can make its housings, rather than its advertising, the most visible part of its identity. Compare HOYA and Fujifilm, two Japanese imaging groups. For this guide we use near-black, a console white, a steel grey and a muted blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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