Mindray Brand Guidelines: The Shenzhen Monitor Maker That Left the NYSE for ChiNext

Seven engineers from Anke.

Mindray was founded in 1991 in Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, by seven former employees of the medical equipment company Anke, among them Li Xiting, Xu Hang and Cheng Minghe, according to both the English and the Chinese Wikipedia. Its full name is Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co., Ltd., and its Chinese name, 迈瑞, is read Màiruì. The business magazine Caixin, writing in May 2018, described the city at its founding as a southern boomtown on the Hong Kong border.

The company grew first at home. Wikipedia says it built its business by supplying patient monitoring, imaging and other diagnostic products to the Chinese market, and that it designs and makes medical equipment and accessories for both human and veterinary use. It is organised into three business lines: Patient Monitoring & Life Support, In-Vitro Diagnostic products and Medical Imaging systems.

The first of those lines is the one closest to the hospital bed. Wikipedia lists its products as multi-parameter patient monitors, biotelemetry systems, anaesthesia delivery systems, defibrillators, ECG machines, pulse oximeters, hospital beds, mounting systems and IT systems. The diagnostic line makes semi-automated and fully automated laboratory instruments, including haematology and biochemistry analysers and the reagents that go with them.

New York, then home to Shenzhen.

Mindray’s stock-market history runs from New York back to Shenzhen. Wikipedia says it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2006; Caixin called it one of China’s earlier companies to list in New York. Ten years later it left. Caixin reported that, like many of its peers, the company felt its shares were undervalued by US investors, and that it was taken private in 2016; Wikipedia dates the delisting to March 2016 and says the aim was a new listing on China’s domestic A-share market.

The road back was not direct. Mindray first applied to list on the main board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, but on 13 February 2018 that application was terminated after the company withdrew it, Caixin reported in February 2018, citing a statement from the China Securities Regulatory Commission; a board representative told the magazine the company would not give up on going public. An investment banker told the magazine the decision followed a change in the regulator’s rules on intangible assets: goodwill now counted towards a limit, and Mindray had built up a large amount of goodwill through its acquisitions. In May 2018 Caixin reported that the company had filed instead for a listing on ChiNext, the Nasdaq-style board of the Shenzhen exchange.

Wikipedia says Mindray was listed again in Shenzhen in October 2018. Its trading home is therefore ChiNext, not the Shenzhen main board it had first aimed for.

Those acquisitions also explain how Mindray reached hospitals outside China. Wikipedia says that in 2008 it bought the patient monitoring division of the American company Datascope to expand its presence abroad, and Caixin listed that business together with the US ultrasound developer Zonare and several Chinese medical device companies among its purchases. Wikipedia says Mindray now has subsidiaries and branch offices in more than thirty countries as well as branch offices across China.

Monitors, defibrillators and the ward.

Makers of patient monitors and resuscitation equipment present themselves through settings more than through objects. The familiar picture is the intensive-care bedside: a monitor beside the bed, its screen filled with coloured waveforms and numbers, wired to the patient and to a central station down the corridor. The same companies also show their equipment in operating theatres, emergency departments and the backs of ambulances.

Outside the hospital, the images change. Automated external defibrillators appear in wall-mounted cabinets in railway stations, airports, offices and sports halls, often in a brightly coloured case marked with a heart symbol. Paramedics are shown kneeling with a portable monitor-defibrillator, and training courses use mannequins on the floor of a classroom, where people practise chest compressions and placing pads.

Much of the visual language comes from the signals themselves. The ECG strip, with its grid of pink or green squares and a running trace, is the oldest of these images, and many makers began with recorders that drew such traces on paper long before screens took over. Waveforms, grids and the outline of a heart recur in catalogues, brochures and trade-fair stands.

Those trade fairs are where the sector meets its buyers. MEDICA in Düsseldorf and Arab Health in the Gulf are among the international shows where makers set out their monitors, defibrillators and software side by side. This guide looks at how individual makers began, who owns them now and what they say about where their products are made, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

BeneHeart and the resuscitation range.

In resuscitation equipment the Mindray name travels with the BeneHeart range. In September 2019 BioSpectrum Asia reported the launch of the BeneHeart C Series automated external defibrillator, in fully automatic and semi-automatic versions, available in Europe and selected other countries. The magazine described a guidance system the company calls ResQNavi, with voice prompts and, in some versions, step-by-step animations for first-time rescuers, and said the units could connect to a cloud system called AED-Alert 2.0 over 4G or Wi-Fi so that a manager is told when a unit’s status changes.

For hospital and ambulance teams, Mindray launched the BeneHeart D60 and D30 defibrillators, 24×7 Magazine reported on 1 February 2023, describing them as tools for both in-hospital and pre-hospital rescue. The magazine said the new units had a large touch screen with gesture control while keeping physical knobs and buttons for key operations, and came with debriefing tools that record rescue data and training modes for single and multi-person practice.

The company has also had its share of public attention at home and abroad. At the end of 2018, Wikipedia says, Mindray withdrew job offers it had made to 254 university students, citing changing economic conditions, and reinstated them in early 2019 after a public outcry, citing corporate social responsibility. In January 2019 it began a partnership with the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana, Wikipedia adds, donating a laboratory analyser to the hospital.

For a design guide, Mindray shows how a company can build an international medical brand from Shenzhen, move its shares from New York back to China and keep one name across monitors, defibrillators, laboratory analysers and imaging. Compare EDAN Instruments, another Chinese name in this series on monitoring makers, and Philips, another maker of patient monitors. For this guide we use a deep blue, an off-white and a red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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