Leoch Brand Guidelines: The 1999 Shenzhen Lead-Battery Maker Listed in Hong Kong

A battery maker founded in 1999.

Leoch began in Shenzhen, in southern China, in 1999. Chinese Wikipedia says it was founded by Dong Li, who is still its chairman, as a Shenzhen power-technology company, and the company’s own milestones page gives 1999 as its starting year. In May 2026 the trade magazine Batteries International still described Dong Li as “the founder and chairman” of what it called a “lead battery major,” after shareholders re-elected him as an executive director at the annual general meeting.

The early years, as the company tells them, were about factories and export. Its milestones page lists a Shenzhen plant and a Malaysia plant in its first year, along with a move into Europe and the United States; a US branch in 2000; and an entry into the telecom sector in 2001, when it says it began working with large telecom operators. A plant in Jiangsu followed in 2003, one at Zhaoqing in Guangdong in 2005, and two in Anhui province, under the UPLUS and Leoch names, in 2007 and 2008.

In 2010 the holding company, Leoch International Technology Limited, listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Chinese Wikipedia dates the first day of dealing to 16 November 2010. The company says it opened European and Singapore branches in 2012, the year it also launched lithium batteries for motorcycles, and in 2014 moved into car-maker supply, rail transit, data centres and energy storage, setting up a lead-carbon research centre in Jiangsu.

Lead, lithium and a spread of plants.

Leoch is, at heart, a lead-acid battery maker that has added lithium. Its corporate profile groups the business into battery energy storage systems for homes, businesses and the grid; telecom and data-centre backup, including UPS batteries; automotive batteries for starting, lighting and ignition, among them start-stop AGM types; motive power for golf carts, bicycles, tricycles, materials handling and forklifts; and battery recycling. The company says it now runs 21 factories and sells in more than 160 countries and regions.

Where things are made is set out on the company’s own facility pages. In China it lists lead-acid plants in Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhaoqing, a lithium plant in Anhui and a recycled-lead works in the same province. In Malaysia it lists sites at Shah Alam making motorcycle and automotive batteries and lead-acid batteries for network power; in Vietnam, plants in Binh Phuoc and Binh Duong provinces for automotive and industrial batteries; in India, two plants at Bhiwadi in Rajasthan making network-power, motorcycle and tubular batteries; and in Mexico, two sites at Saltillo in Coahuila, one for network-power and motive batteries and one for automotive and commercial-vehicle batteries.

That map grew in stages, by the company’s account: a second Malaysian plant and an Indian plant in 2015, Vietnamese plants in 2019, a lithium pack plant in Vietnam and a third Malaysian plant in 2022, the first Mexican plant in 2023 and a second in 2025. Leoch also says it bought into lead recycling, taking a stake in Dahua Lead Recycling in 2017 and in Juli Lead Recycling in 2023, the year it also took stakes in two automotive battery firms.

Lithium has become a larger part of the story. The company says it launched its own lithium cell in 2019 and took storage lithium into Europe and the United States in 2020. In October 2025, Batteries International reported, Leoch announced that its Epoch integrated energy storage system, a 5MWh lithium unit, had received what the company called China’s first UL 9540 certification.

Design and documentation.

Industrial batteries are rarely seen by the people who depend on them. They sit under the seat of a forklift truck, in a locked room behind a telephone exchange or in the cabinets that keep a data centre running when the mains fail, so the makers in this guide have to show their products in places most readers will never visit.

Their pictures tend to come from a small set of scenes. There are rows of cells on a factory floor, forklift batteries packed into steel trays, standby racks lined up in data centres and telecom rooms, and cutaway diagrams that open a cell to show its plates, separators and chemistry. Newer lithium makers add architects’ renderings of large cell factories, and the oldest firms reach back to photographs of early lead and nickel works and to the railway, telephone and submarine customers they first supplied.

The trade is also a story of ownership. Many of these names have passed through electrical groups, private equity funds, stock markets and energy companies, and several survive mainly as brands inside larger groups. Regulators have looked at the trade too: in 2017 Germany’s competition authority fined two makers of industrial batteries over a shared lead surcharge, and a French heritage inventory has recorded one maker’s Bordeaux factory buildings as industrial architecture.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its batteries are made and which product names it uses — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

A Hong Kong-listed group with a Singapore address.

Leoch now presents itself as a global group. Its website gives its headquarters as Singapore and carries the Hong Kong stock code on its corporate profile; Chinese Wikipedia, in an older entry, lists a head office in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district. The management has changed around the founder: in January 2026 Batteries International reported that group chief executive Kouyue Wu, chief executive since December 2024 and with the company since 2014, had joined the board as an executive director.

The United States has been the group’s most recent test. Batteries International reported at the end of March 2026 that Leoch planned to spin off a US company, Leoch Energy, with its shares to be listed in New York, and that it had expected the American unit to have a new plant in place in 2027. Days later, on 2 April 2026, the Shanghai Metals Market news service reported that Leoch had decided, after weighing market and regulatory conditions, not to proceed with the spin-off and US listing at that stage, and that Leoch Energy would look at other ways to raise money.

As a brand, Leoch writes its name in capitals across its website, and it sells largely to other businesses: telecom operators, data-centre builders, vehicle makers and equipment makers, as its industry pages set out. Its catalogue can be browsed by chemistry, lithium or lead-acid, and by use, with sections for network power, transportation, motive power and smart energy.

For a design guide, Leoch shows how a battery maker can present itself through the uses it serves rather than through a single hero product. Compare Exide, a far older name in lead-acid batteries, and East Penn, the Pennsylvania battery maker. For this guide we use a deep harbour blue, pale steel and a brass yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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