Launch Tech Brand Guidelines: The Shenzhen X-431 Maker of Diagnostics, Lifts & Aligners

A diagnostics start-up in a new city.

Launch Tech began in Shenzhen in 1992. Chinese Wikipedia gives its full name as Shenzhen Launch Tech Co., Ltd. and its founders as Liu Xin, the chairman, and Liu Jun, the chief executive, and says it began as a limited company before becoming a joint-stock company. The company’s own history dates its founding to August 1992, and its website writes the name in capitals, LAUNCH.

Its early products were electronic tools for finding faults in cars. The company says it published the LE100 in 1994, a tool for troubleshooting electronic engine controls, built a sales network for it in 1995, and in the later 1990s developed successive versions of an “electronic eye” diagnostic tool, the line that became the X-431. It also says it introduced the idea of the “automotive aftermarket” to China as early as 1994. These are the company’s own accounts of its first decade.

Launch Tech went public in 2002. Chinese Wikipedia says its shares were listed on the Growth Enterprise Market of the Hong Kong stock exchange on 7 October 2002, under the code 8196, and moved to the exchange’s main board on 28 March 2011, under the code 2488. The company’s website gives the same two listings.

The company grew outward in the following years. Its history says it took over a German company and set up European representative offices in 2003, and opened offices in Brazil in 2007 and in Argentina and Korea in 2008.

X-431 and the garage floor.

The X-431 is the name most closely tied to the brand. The company calls the series a benchmark in diagnostic technology; the range has appeared in many versions, from the X431 3G of 2010 to the X-431 PAD tablets the company lists today. A Business Wire release from Templeton Emerging Markets Group in August 2010 described Launch Tech as a leading provider of aftermarket diagnostic tools in China.

Launch Tech is also a maker of heavy garage equipment. Its website describes a product line covering diagnostics, inspection, maintenance and vehicle lifts, and runs separate sites for tyre and workshop equipment. The company says it invested in a large lift production base in 2004, moved its machinery department to Shanghai in 2008, introduced the X-631 wheel aligner in 2008, the X712 3D aligner in 2011 and the X-613 wireless 3D wheel aligner in 2025, and developed the KWB503 wheel balancer in 2010. In 2006, it says, it moved into its own industrial park in Shenzhen’s Longgang district.

The company lists many Chinese trade awards and titles in its history, almost all from industry associations, magazines and local governments. Among them, it says its X-431 Mobile Diagnostic Center won China’s Red Star design award in 2019, and that in 2025 the national Ministry of Industry and Information Technology named it a manufacturing “single champion” enterprise. It also says it has research teams in the United States, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Malaysia besides its Shenzhen centre, and that its products are sold in more than 200 countries and regions. These figures are the company’s own. Its website also lists ISO 9001 and IATF 16949 certificates for its quality system, and the company says an X-431 tool came first in a 2004 assessment by the German trade magazine kfz-Meister Service.

Garage equipment and its makers.

Garage equipment is sold to people who already know what a lift or a tyre changer should do, so the makers’ own material tends to show the machines at work. The usual picture is a two-post lift with a car raised to head height in a clean, well-lit workshop, the columns and arms set against pale floors and painted walls, with a technician underneath for scale.

Wheel-service equipment has its own look. Tyre changers and wheel balancers are typically shown as compact cabinets in strong body colours — reds, blues and greys recur across the trade — with a wheel mounted and the controls in view. Alignment systems are often shown through their targets or sensors clamped to the wheels and a screen nearby, and brake testers through rollers set into the workshop floor.

Much of the selling happens face to face. Makers present their ranges at trade fairs such as Automechanika in Frankfurt and at national shows, and most sell through dealer and installer networks rather than directly, so dealer locators, installer programmes and training centres feature prominently on their websites. Certification marks and named standards also appear often; Rotary Lift, for example, says many of its lifts carry the certification mark of the Automotive Lift Institute, a trade body formed in 1945.

The makers in this guide include family firms, private companies and brands held inside larger industrial groups. This guide sets out what can be checked about each — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Chinese name in a Western trade.

In 2010 Launch Tech formed an alliance with an American equipment group. A Business Wire release issued by Templeton Emerging Markets Group on 30 August 2010 said that SPX Service Solutions, a business unit of SPX Corporation based in Warren, Michigan, had signed a strategic alliance framework agreement with Launch Tech and had acquired a minority equity position in the company. The release said the two companies would be able to co-market each other’s products and use each other’s distribution networks, and described Launch Tech as serving 400 distributors in 60 countries at the time. Launch Tech’s own history notes the SPX shareholding in October 2010.

Its website now leads with intelligent diagnostics, remote diagnosis, driver-assistance calibration, tyre-pressure sensors and electric-vehicle service, and says it has developed an AI assistant for car repair. In 2024, it says, it opened its first electric-vehicle service station in Dubai and completed a headquarters building in Xi’an; in 2022 it marked its 30th anniversary.

The company says it moved from direct selling to selling through distributors in 2008. Its website links to regional online shops in the United States, Canada, Australia, Latin America, Europe and the United Kingdom, and the company says it has held distributor conferences for overseas partners, the 26th in Thailand in 2025.

For a design guide, Launch Tech shows how a brand built on one product name — the X-431 — can stretch across a whole garage of equipment. Compare John Bean, an American wheel-service brand, and Hunter Engineering, another maker of wheel aligners. For this guide we use a deep red, graphite, slate and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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