APsystems Brand Guidelines: Jiaxing Microinverters From Altenergy Power System

Two founders, two origin stories.

APsystems is the trading name of a microinverter maker headquartered in Jiaxing, in Zhejiang province, eastern China. Its original legal name is Altenergy Power System, and its shares trade in Shanghai under the name Yuneng Technology. A microinverter converts the direct current from one or a few solar panels into household alternating current right at the panel, rather than in a single central box; APsystems has built its business around that idea.

The company tells its origin in two ways. In a release for its fifteenth anniversary, in March 2025, it said it was founded on 24 March 2010 in Jiaxing, when Dr Zhimin Ling and Dr Yuhao Luo returned to China to start it. Its 2015 rebranding release, by contrast, said the company was founded in Silicon Valley in 2009 with a single product, a first-generation microinverter. English Wikipedia gives a Silicon Valley founding in 2010, with a joint venture and factory in Jiaxing. China Daily, reporting in June 2022, gave the company’s establishment as 2010.

For its first years it traded as APS. In 2015, the company announced, APS became APsystems, a change it described as a move from a product-oriented portfolio towards whole systems; English Wikipedia dates the change to September 2015. At the time the release named Jiaxing and Seattle as its headquarters, with regional offices in Europe, Australia and Shanghai.

The company says it has since set up subsidiaries in Australia, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Mexico and Brazil. Ling, named as co-founder and chief executive in 2015, was described by China Daily in 2022 as the company’s chairperson.

More panels per microinverter.

APsystems’ signature is the multi-module microinverter: one unit serving two or four panels rather than one. Its 2015 release called the dual-module YC500 its flagship and described the YC1000 as a fourth-generation design with three-phase output handling up to four modules, aimed at commercial buildings. English Wikipedia records the company’s first single-module microinverter, the YC200, in 2011.

The four-module idea moved into homes in 2018. Solar Power World reported in August that year that APsystems would unveil the QS1, a four-module single-phase microinverter for residential use, at the Solar Power International show in Anaheim, California, in a news item supplied by the company. The same magazine reported in January 2018 that APsystems had joined the approved vendor list of the US residential solar provider Sunnova.

English Wikipedia records two further steps: the launch in 2019 of APsmart, a separate brand for rapid-shutdown devices, and the dual-module DS3 series in 2021. The company’s website now places storage beside the microinverters, from the ELS home battery charger to a modular system for commercial sites called OCEAN, with monitoring through its Energy Communication Unit and EMA software.

The newest market is the balcony. In May 2023 pv magazine reported that APsystems, which it called a China-based inverter manufacturer, had released the EZ1, a microinverter for balcony systems and do-it-yourself installations that plugs into a household socket and is set up through a phone app over WiFi and Bluetooth. In June 2024 pv magazine reported from the Intersolar show that the company had unveiled the EZHI, a single-phase hybrid inverter for balconies that stores surplus power in a battery and, according to APsystems, uses gallium nitride semiconductors.

Design and documentation.

Solar inverter makers sell a box that most owners rarely look at. The inverter usually hangs on a garage or utility-room wall, with the panels it serves out of sight on the roof, so the companies that make them tend to show the whole system: rows of modules on a tiled roof, a slim inverter mounted beside the fuse board, and, more and more often, a stack of battery modules standing next to it.

The screen has become as important as the hardware. Inverter makers commonly pair their hardware with a monitoring app or energy management platform, and their marketing leans on phone screens with daily power curves, battery charge levels and the flow of electricity between roof, home and grid. Growatt and GoodWe both describe software platforms as part of their range, and GoodWe linked its 2022 rebrand and the slogan “Smart Energy Innovator” to that shift.

Factories and trade fairs supply the rest of the imagery. Brand imagery in this field also turns to production lines, test benches and new headquarters buildings, while the industry gathers each year at shows such as Intersolar Europe in Munich and its regional editions, where makers fill large stands with inverters, battery cabinets and charging equipment and launch new product lines.

Two of the makers in this guide, Growatt and GoodWe, were founded in 2010, in Shenzhen and Suzhou, and both have since added home and commercial batteries to their inverters. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that keeps its original company.

The company went public in 2022. China Daily reported that Altenergy Power System of Jiaxing was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on 8 June 2022, becoming the city’s 76th listed company; the listing was on the STAR Market, the exchange’s board for technology companies, under the name Yuneng Technology. The company’s anniversary release describes the listing as its debut on that board.

The 2015 rebrand also produced APsystems’ one documented logo fact. The phrase “Altenergy Power,” the release said, would appear beneath the APsystems name in the new mark, as a nod to the company’s original legal name. The name itself joins the old initials to the word systems, matching the company’s stated shift from single products to whole systems.

On manufacturing, English Wikipedia describes the Jiaxing joint venture as operating a factory there, and the company describes itself as having been founded in Jiaxing. In 2013, Wikipedia notes, one US distributor was selling APS microinverters certified as made in Washington state for a state incentive programme.

Its reach is international. At the time of the listing, China Daily quoted Ling as saying the company’s microinverters, shutoff devices and energy communicators had been sold in more than 100 countries and regions, including the United States, Europe and Australia. English Wikipedia records an office in Sydney from 2011, a warehouse in the Netherlands from 2013, an office in Lyon for western and southern Europe from 2016 and an office in Mexico from 2017, and lists regional offices today in Austin, Texas, Shanghai, Sydney, Amsterdam, Lyon and Zapopan.

For a design guide, APsystems shows how a technical company can carry its founding name inside a new mark. Compare Enphase, the American microinverter maker, and Hoymiles, another Chinese maker of microinverters. For this guide we use a navy and a leaf green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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