Nuctech Brand Guidelines: The Tsinghua Spin-Off Behind Cargo and Baggage Scanners

Container-inspection research turned into a company.

Nuctech began in Beijing in 1997. English Wikipedia says it was set up by several professors from Tsinghua University who wanted to turn their research on container inspection into a business, and Chinese Wikipedia gives the same year and origin. The company’s own Chinese-language website describes Nuctech as a supplier of security inspection products and services that grew out of Tsinghua University, with radiation imaging as its core technology. Its full Chinese name is 同方威视技术股份有限公司, and the short form, 同方威视, carries the Tongfang name of its parent company.

The first customers were at home. English Wikipedia says Nuctech sold inspection systems to Chinese customs in 1999 and signed its first international contracts, with Australia and the United Arab Emirates, in 2001. Its scanners were later used at large public events, the same article says, including the 2014 football World Cup and the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Brazil, the 2015 Milan Expo and the 2015 Wimbledon tournament.

Manufacturing spread abroad as the business grew. English Wikipedia records a factory in Brazil from 2015 and another at Kobyłka, a town near Warsaw, from 2018; in 2016 the company formed a subsidiary, FoundMacro, for the defence sector. The European Commission names a Polish company, Nuctech Warsaw, and a Dutch one, Instech Netherlands, as Nuctech’s companies in the EU. The Chinese website says Nuctech’s products and services reach more than 130 countries and regions, and that it holds stakes in more than ten companies, mainly in places including Hong Kong, Australia, Turkey and Argentina.

Cargo portals, baggage tunnels and people scanners.

Nuctech’s range is built around imaging. Its Chinese website groups the products into cargo and vehicle inspection, baggage and parcel inspection, people screening, explosives and contraband detection, radioactive-material monitoring and health-quarantine equipment. In cargo it lists fixed systems in an FG series, combined mobile systems in an MB series, vehicle-mounted mobile systems in an MT series and rail systems in an RF series, alongside backscatter units and under-vehicle inspection robots.

For airports and stations the site lists X-ray machines for hand luggage, mail, hold baggage and cargo, CT baggage inspection systems, portable X-ray units and self-service bag-drop systems. People screening covers transmission and backscatter body scanners, millimetre-wave and terahertz imagers, walk-through metal detectors with temperature measurement, and handheld metal detectors. The technology pages name X-ray imaging, ion mobility spectrometry, Raman spectroscopy, electron irradiation and millimetre-wave holographic imaging.

Outside security, the same site lists nuclear-technology applications: ore sorting and grade analysis, irradiation, non-destructive testing and composition analysis. The markets it names include customs and ports, civil aviation, post and logistics, rail transit, police and courts, large events and mineral sorting. The European Commission, in a notice published in January 2026, describes Nuctech as active worldwide in the manufacturing and sale of threat detection systems for airports, ports, railways and roads, borders and critical infrastructure.

Screening and identity hardware.

Security screening and identity hardware is mostly seen in passing: the X-ray tunnel at an airport checkpoint, the arch a traveller walks through, the grey trays that slide back along a roller track. The companies that make this equipment sell to airports, customs services, border agencies, banks and governments rather than to the public, and their brands are built for procurement teams, regulators and trade-fair visitors.

Their imagery follows the equipment. Websites and brochures show security lanes with scanner tunnels and conveyor belts, walk-through metal detectors, cargo portals and gantries that a lorry drives through, and the operator screens on which bags appear as layered X-ray images. Identity makers work at a different scale: card printers small enough for an office desk, and the production lines on which passports, bank cards and ID cards are made and personalised.

Much of the business is about approvals and contracts. Makers name the regulators whose lists or standards their machines appear on, such as the US Transportation Security Administration or the European Civil Aviation Conference, and announce orders airport by airport and agency by agency. New products are shown at trade fairs such as Passenger Terminal Expo for airport equipment and Security Essen in Germany, where screening, access-control and identity companies exhibit side by side.

Ownership in this field changes often. Some of the makers in this guide were built from acquisitions or sit inside larger listed groups, and some have changed hands recently: Smiths Detection passed from Smiths Group to CVC Capital Partners in June 2026. 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.

A state-owned group, and two official actions.

Nuctech sits inside a state-owned group. The European Commission’s notice of 23 January 2026 says Nuctech Technology is controlled by Tsinghua Tongfang, which is controlled by the China National Nuclear Corporation, itself controlled by China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. English Wikipedia says Tsinghua Tongfang, listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, owns about two thirds of Nuctech, while Chinese Wikipedia gives 71 percent. English Wikipedia adds that the China National Nuclear Corporation bought a 21 percent stake in Tsinghua Tongfang in 2019.

That ownership and the company’s equipment have drawn official action. On 22 December 2020 the US Department of Commerce published a rule in the Federal Register adding “Tongfang NucTech Technology Ltd.,” also known as NucTech, to the Entity List, with a licence policy of presumption of denial for items subject to US export rules; the rule said the government’s End-User Review Committee had found that Nuctech’s lower-performing equipment impaired US efforts against illicit trafficking in nuclear and other radioactive materials. In April 2024 the European Commission inspected the premises of Nuctech Warsaw and Instech Netherlands under the EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation, and on 11 December 2025 it opened an in-depth investigation, stating that this does not prejudge its final decision. The same day, Nuctech said in a statement reported by Xinhua and carried by Malaysia’s The Star that it had “always operated independently,” had complied with the laws of every jurisdiction where it works, including the EU, and would keep cooperating with the investigators.

The Commission’s notice sets out what it is examining. It says it found sufficient indications that, after 12 July 2018, Nuctech received grants from central or local public authorities in China and fiscal measures such as reduced corporate income tax rates, an extra deduction for research and development costs and refunds of value-added tax on software, and it lists further inspections at its competition directorate in Brussels in 2024 and 2025. Xinhua reported that China’s Ministry of Commerce had concluded in early 2025 that the regulation was a “trade and investment barrier,” and that the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU also criticised the investigation.

For a design guide, Nuctech shows how a maker of large infrastructure machines presents itself through product families and series codes rather than consumer branding. Compare Smiths Detection and Rapiscan Systems, two other makers of airport and cargo screening equipment. For this guide we use a deep steel blue, a pale grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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