KSTAR Brand Guidelines: The 1993 Shenzhen UPS Maker Listed in 2010

A UPS maker from the early 1990s.

KSTAR is the brand of Shenzhen Kstar Science & Technology Co., Ltd., known in Chinese as 科士达. The company says it was founded in 1993 and that it entered the market for uninterruptible power supplies that same year; Chinese Wikipedia gives the same founding year and names the founder as Liu Chengyu, whom it also lists as chairman. According to Chinese Wikipedia, its predecessor was a Kstar electronics company in Xiapu, in Fujian province.

The company’s own timeline marks the steps of its growth. It says it opened the Guanlan Industrial Park in Shenzhen in 1998; completed an industrial park at Zhongkai in Huizhou in 2009, the year it entered renewable energy; and put a further park at Guangming, Shenzhen, into operation in 2013, when it entered the electric-vehicle market. Its headquarters are in Shenzhen.

In 2010 the company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, under the stock code 002518, according to both Chinese Wikipedia and the company. Chinese Wikipedia describes it as a high-technology maker of electric power and power-supply products, headquartered in Shenzhen, whose main lines are critical infrastructure for data centres and solar power systems, sold in China and abroad.

The company also lists official recognitions it has received at home: a national enterprise technical centre in 2015, a national technology-innovation model enterprise in 2016, CNAS laboratory accreditation in 2018 and, in 2023, recognition as a national green factory. These are the company’s own listings, as is its count of 994 patents.

UPS, cooling, solar and storage.

KSTAR’s range starts with power protection. On its website the company describes a profile of data-centre critical infrastructure — uninterruptible power supplies, batteries and precision air conditioners — alongside modular data-centre solutions, solar inverters, energy-storage systems and electric-vehicle chargers. It says it sells in more than 180 countries and regions and employs more than 4,300 people, about 750 of them in research and development; Chinese Wikipedia gives a similar headcount.

The company also makes claims about its standing in the UPS trade. Its website says that, according to an IHS Markit report, KSTAR ranked fifth in the global UPS market; a company press release in May 2022 said its shipments ranked fifth worldwide in 2021, up one place from 2019. Both are KSTAR’s own statements of other firms’ research.

The move into storage brought a partnership with the battery maker CATL. In April 2019 Yicai Global reported that Contemporary Amperex Technology would form a joint venture with Shenzhen Kstar, based at CATL’s headquarters in Ningde, Fujian, with CATL holding 51 percent and Kstar 49 percent, to develop, make and sell charging piles, energy-storage and power-conversion systems and related lithium battery products, including photovoltaic storage units able to recharge electric vehicles. The statement quoted by Yicai Global said the venture would draw on the technical and market strengths of both partners. KSTAR’s timeline lists the joint-venture factory in 2019, and in 2021 an investment in a battery maker in Jiangxi.

Manufacturing then went abroad. In May 2022 Southeast Asia Infrastructure reported that Kstar was building a manufacturing base in northern Vietnam in two phases, the first adding production of UPS units, modular data centres and solar inverters; the company named the site as Haiphong in a press release that month. In that release the company said the factory was being built to meet growing demand for its export orders, that the first phase would create about 200 jobs, and that it was the first time it had used factories in Vietnam, to give customers more diverse production bases. Its timeline records the founding of KSTAR (Vietnam) Co., Ltd. in 2020 and says the Vietnam plant went into operation in 2023.

Power protection and the data centre.

The makers of uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution and precision cooling sell equipment that most people never see. It stands in plant rooms and data halls behind locked doors, so the companies tend to show it in place: long rows of grey cabinets under white light, battery strings racked floor to ceiling, switchgear with its doors open, and chillers and heat-rejection units lined up on rooftops and in yards outside.

The data hall itself has become the stock image of the trade. Photographs and renderings return again and again to cold-aisle containment, with server racks closed in behind glass doors and ceiling panels, to cooling units set between the racks, and to engineers with laptops checking a cabinet’s display. As computing loads have grown, liquid-cooling pipework, coolant units and prefabricated modules built off site have joined the cabinets in the pictures.

Factories, test laboratories and trade fairs supply the rest. These companies often show their own production lines and test bays, where equipment is run before it ships, and the industry gathers at events such as Data Centre World and the DCD conference series, where makers fill stands with UPS cabinets, cooling units and power distribution gear and present new ranges to data-centre operators and engineers. Corporate language leans on continuity: Vertiv, for example, presented itself as “Architects of Continuity” when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.

The companies in this guide range from listed groups to family firms, and several carry long histories under changing owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Capital letters for a listed manufacturer.

The brand is written in capitals as KSTAR on the company’s English pages, while the registered English name uses Kstar. The same letters belong to an unrelated subject: KSTAR is also the name of a South Korean fusion research device, so the Shenzhen company and its products are the subject here. Its English website is kstar.com.

Where the products are made rests on the company’s account. It names industrial parks at Guanlan and Guangming in Shenzhen and at Zhongkai in Huizhou, a battery operation in Jiangxi and the plant in Vietnam; in May 2022 its press release spoke of six manufacturing and assembly facilities, nearly 3,000 employees and business in more than 150 countries, figures that its website has since raised. The same release put the Vietnamese site at 47,715 square metres in Haiphong, which it called the biggest port city in northern Vietnam. In 2024, it says, construction began on a new energy and storage industrial base, and in 2025 it commissioned a new battery grid-plate line in Jiangxi.

For a design guide, KSTAR shows how a power-protection maker can carry one short capitalised name across very different product families, from UPS units and precision cooling to solar inverters and energy storage. Compare Huawei, another Shenzhen company, and Vertiv, a maker of UPS and data-centre cooling. For this guide we use a deep teal, a pale mist and an orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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