SOFAR Brand Guidelines: Xu Tao’s Shenzhen Inverter Maker, Listed in 2025

A third venture, and small inverters for home roofs.

SOFAR is the trading name of Shenzhen SOFARSOLAR Co., Ltd., in Chinese 深圳市首航新能源股份有限公司, a maker of solar inverters, storage inverters and batteries based in Shenzhen. The investment news site PEdaily reported in April 2025 that its chairman, Xu Tao, founded the company in 2013; 36Kr, citing the company’s prospectus, says he took part in setting up its predecessor that year and now serves as chairman and general manager.

It was not his first business. According to both outlets, Xu studied at Hunan University and worked as a lecturer and at a Shenzhen securities-information company before starting an electronic-components trading business in Shenzhen in 2003, and then, in 2010, a company that developed and made connected terminals for cars. SOFAR was his third venture.

At the start, PEdaily reported, SOFAR made mainly low-power grid-tied inverters for the Chinese domestic market. Exports grew as home solar spread, and the prospectus, as summarised by PEdaily, says the company began working with the Polish solar distributor CORAB as early as 2014. The same report dates a turning point to 2019, when European Union anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures on Chinese solar products expired and overseas demand rose; that year SOFAR also introduced a new generation of storage inverters and storage batteries.

Outside rankings give a sense of its scale. 36Kr, citing the prospectus, reported that the research firm IHS Markit placed SOFAR ninth worldwide in residential inverter shipments for 2021, and that Wood Mackenzie placed it tenth in global photovoltaic inverter shipments for 2023. Most of its sales are made abroad, chiefly in Europe, the same report says. PEdaily linked the strongest year, 2022, to the energy shock in Europe after the start of the war in Ukraine, when higher electricity prices lifted demand for Chinese solar and storage exports, and reported that demand from European homes and businesses slowed from the second half of 2023.

From rooftop units to battery cabinets.

SOFAR’s range runs from small rooftop units to equipment for solar farms. Its website lists photovoltaic inverters from 1 kW to 350 kW and hybrid inverters from 3 kW to 125 kW, alongside home batteries, battery cabinets for commercial and utility sites, AC chargers for electric cars and a monitoring platform called SofarCloud. Trade titles reporting the listing in April 2025, including Saur Energy and Canal Solar, described a core line-up of string inverters up to 320 kW and storage inverters of 3 to 20 kW, so the upper limits have moved as products have been added.

The company says it runs three research and development centres and two manufacturing bases, with service platforms in more than twenty countries, after-sales centres in Poland and the Czech Republic and a warehouse in the Netherlands, and that more than 95 percent of its staff outside China are hired locally. It says its cumulative inverter shipments passed 34 GW by June 2024, and its Brazilian team told Canal Solar that it had sold 4.3 GW of inverters in that country. It also says EUPD Research named it a “Top Brand PV” in markets including India, Poland, the United Kingdom, Italy, Brazil and Australia. Those are the company’s own statements, repeated in the trade coverage of its listing.

Ownership is set out in the prospectus. Before the listing, 36Kr reported, Xu Tao held directly and indirectly about 52.75 percent of the company and was its controlling shareholder and actual controller; after the listing his direct stake was about 37 percent. Outside investors arrived from July 2021, among them Shenzhen Capital Group and, in November 2021, a wholly owned investment arm of the battery maker CATL, which held about 2.4 percent after the listing. CATL also became SOFAR’s largest supplier of battery cells in 2022, the same report said; from 2023 it was no longer among SOFAR’s five largest suppliers. Grid-tied inverters remained the largest source of revenue in every year the prospectus covered, while storage batteries grew sharply from 2021, 36Kr reported.

How the category presents itself.

Solar inverter makers sell a box that most owners rarely look at. The inverter usually hangs on a garage or utility-room wall, with the panels it serves out of sight on the roof, so the companies that make them tend to show the whole system: rows of modules on a tiled roof, a slim inverter mounted beside the fuse board, and, more and more often, a stack of battery modules standing next to it.

The screen has become as important as the hardware. Inverter makers commonly pair their hardware with a monitoring app or energy management platform, and their marketing leans on phone screens with daily power curves, battery charge levels and the flow of electricity between roof, home and grid. Growatt and GoodWe both describe software platforms as part of their range, and GoodWe linked its 2022 rebrand and the slogan “Smart Energy Innovator” to that shift.

Factories and trade fairs supply the rest of the imagery. Brand imagery in this field also turns to production lines, test benches and new headquarters buildings, while the industry gathers each year at shows such as Intersolar Europe in Munich and its regional editions, where makers fill large stands with inverters, battery cabinets and charging equipment and launch new product lines.

Two of the makers in this guide, Growatt and GoodWe, were founded in 2010, in Shenzhen and Suzhou, and both have since added home and commercial batteries to their inverters. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One short Latin name for export.

The listing took time. SOFAR first applied to list on the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in June 2022 and passed the exchange’s review in March 2023, 36Kr reported, but the process was suspended several times because its financial statements had expired, and registration came only in early 2025. The money raised was earmarked for an energy storage system project, product development and manufacturing, an upgraded research centre and a larger sales network, the same report said. On 2 April 2025 the shares began trading under the code 301658, and Xu Tao rang the opening bell, SolarQuarter reported.

The name works in two registers. At home the company is 首航新能 on the exchange; abroad it trades as SOFAR, and its corporate name runs the words together as SOFARSOLAR. Its website carries the line “Energy to Power Your Life.” The largest customer named in the prospectus, 36Kr reported, was ZCS, and overseas sales made up most of its revenue in each year the prospectus covered.

For a design guide, SOFAR shows how a Shenzhen inverter maker built an export brand on a short Latin-letter name while keeping its Chinese corporate name at home. Compare Growatt and Sungrow, two other Chinese inverter makers. For this guide we use a deep slate blue, ink, a pale grey and a warm amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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