There is such a company in China, known as the “Little Huawei for Industrial Control”, and it is Inovance Technology.
In 2024, Inovance Technology will achieve revenue of 37.041 billion yuan through its four major businesses: general automation, new energy vehicles, smart elevators and rail transit, successfully breaking through the 30 billion mark.
On January 19, 2026, Inovance Technology announced that in order to further promote its internationalization strategy, it is planning to issue and list H shares.
As early as 2022, Huichuan Technology has designated internationalization as the company’s number one strategy for future development, and this listing in Hong Kong is another clear manifestation of its global ambitions.
To explore whether Inovance Technologies can carve out a niche in the international market, we can start from its two strategies of “borrowing ships to go overseas” and “industry lines going overseas”.
The so-called “borrowing ships to go overseas” refers to following the overseas expansion of Chinese companies, providing them with supporting equipment and solutions, and promoting their own business to the world.
Inovance Technologies wants to “borrow a boat” from other Chinese companies that are preparing to invest and build factories overseas, and it wants to carry its industrial automation business.
Inovance Technology’s ability to attract customers relies on the technical barriers it has established.
In 2021, Inovance Technology promises that the R&D expense rate will remain within the range of 8% – 10% for a long time, and has remained stable in this range for the next four years.
In the first three quarters of 2025, R&D expenses were 2.994 billion yuan, and the R&D expense rate was 9.46%.
The emphasis on R&D has enabled Inovance Technology to possess a wealth of industrial automation technologies and a nearly comprehensive product matrix.
It has mastered many core technologies at the driver layer, control layer and execution layer, and has broken through many industry problems.
In the past few decades, China’s industrial automation market has been occupied by foreign giants, but by the first half of 2025, Inovance Technology’s servo systems and low-voltage inverters ranked first in the Chinese market with 32% and 22% market shares. Small PLCs and industrial robots also have a good market share, which proves the high quality of its technology and products.
The high-tech products and solutions generated by R&D capabilities have made more and more Chinese manufacturing companies willing to cooperate with Inovance Technologies.
In the first three quarters of 2025, the company’s order volume for borrowing ships to go to sea will be approximately 900-1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of more than 50%.
Although the company did not give accurate revenue figures for its ship lending business, it can be known that the scale of its general automation overseas business will actually be larger than the overseas revenue data disclosed in the financial report.
For a long time, the overseas revenue disclosed in Inovance Technology’s financial reports has basically been contributed by the “industry lines overseas” strategy.
“Industrial lines going overseas” refers to leveraging the experience of serving multinational enterprises in China to extend the company’s customized solutions to the overseas branches of these customers.
This strategy relies on the comprehensive promotion of Inovance Technology’s GLOBALOCAL model, that is, the localization of “research, production, sales, and investment”.
In terms of production, Inovance Technology has created a “three-base radiation circle”; in terms of sales, it has established 18 subsidiaries around the world and more than 130 overseas distributors; in terms of research and development, a number of technologies have obtained international certification; in terms of investment, it has acquired SBC of South Korea and IRAI of France.
In different regions and businesses, Inovance Technology adopts different strategies, such as adopting the “industry line + regional line” operating model in the emerging markets of the Pan-Asia-Pacific region, and adopting the “platform product + customized product parallel” strategy in the developed European markets.
In terms of new energy business, Inovance Technology focuses on the European market and relies on its subsidiary United Power to reach cooperation with many mainstream European automobile brands.
United Dynamics implements the GLOBALOCAL model and achieves explosive growth in overseas revenue.
In the first three quarters of 2025, United Power’s overseas business grew by nearly 50%, to about 769 million yuan, which is higher than the domestic growth rate.
It can be seen that the overseas expansion of Inovance Technology’s industry lines can promote rapid growth in overseas revenue, mainly because of the three-dimensional implementation of its GLOBALOCAL model in different regions and different businesses.
However, Inovance Technology also admitted that the company’s overseas business is still relatively small at present, and it still requires great efforts to achieve a sustained increase in the proportion of overseas business.
With this plan to go public in Hong Kong, Inovance Technology has clearly put its global ambitions on the table, and its future development is worth looking forward to.
