KINGBROTHER Marks Five Years Listed: Wu Shoukun on the Evolution from PCB Prototyping to IPDM + AI

On August 11, KINGBROTHER marked the fifth anniversary of its listing. Stepping further back, the company's roots reach all the way to 1997. It began with PCB prototyping, then gradually folded design, engineering, and manufacturing into what is now the IPDM model, and in recent years extended that capability into pilot production, digital services, and AI engineering tools. In a recent interview with Shanghai Securities News, Chairman and President Wu Shoukun summed up the path in a single line: the company's founding purpose has been to help customers innovate, and to turn KINGBROTHER into a service-oriented partner for electronics product innovation.

Starting with Quick-Turn Prototyping and Choosing a Differentiated Path

KINGBROTHER was founded in 1997, with Wu Shoukun initially involved as an angel investor. From the outset, the company avoided competing with large manufacturers on scale and instead moved directly into PCB prototyping, a business the industry calls quick-turn and one built on fast response and fast delivery. During a visit to the United States, Wu toured a Silicon Valley PCB company organized around the idea of time-to-market, a company that concentrated on helping customers shorten product launch timelines rather than simply expanding manufacturing capacity. The experience reinforced his belief that KINGBROTHER should organize itself around customer innovation, keeping manufacturing strong while steadily deepening process R&D and engineering services.

That judgment later shaped the company's positioning. In Wu's own words, while large manufacturers compete on scale and output, KINGBROTHER would compete on process R&D and engineering services, becoming a PCB prototyping specialist. The company invested its energy in new product introduction and engineering services: helping customers sort out designs, optimize processes, run manufacturability analysis and engineering validation, and gradually move the process experience gained on the manufacturing side upstream into the customer's R&D stage. Wu wanted KINGBROTHER to become an engineering partner to its customers.

Extending Along the Value Chain to Build the IPDM Model

As customer needs evolved, KINGBROTHER began considering how to extend the engineering-services capability it had built during the prototyping stage further up and down the value chain. In 2006, the company set out a one-stop design-and-manufacturing strategy, and in 2007 it launched its PCB design business, with engineers joining early in product development to work on system design, high-speed board design, and signal integrity analysis, resolving manufacturability issues as far as possible at the drawing stage. After filling in the front-end design, Wu turned his attention to the back end of manufacturing. In 2008, a communications-module assembly line came online, and the company's scope expanded into PCBA and electronics manufacturing services (EMS). At that point, PCB design, process R&D and engineering services, PCB manufacturing, and EMS were brought together into an integrated product design and manufacturing model known as IPDM. KINGBROTHER had become an integrated electronics design and manufacturing services provider.

Supporting a one-stop service meant keeping production capacity in step. In 2009, the company began building an industry-university-research base in Huizhou's Daya Bay, and in January 2010 the Xi'an KINGBROTHER PCB plant went into production, further rounding out the manufacturing footprint for prototypes and small- to medium-batch, high-layer-count boards. Wu placed this shift against the broader backdrop of industry competition. The company's focus, he said, is the complete product rather than an individual component. Competition in electronics now turns on the efficiency of product innovation instead of manufacturing capability, and only a service provider that can simultaneously understand an application scenario, offer a solution, complete engineering validation, and deliver flexible manufacturing can truly help a customer bring a product to market faster.

Turning Engineering Experience into Platform Capability

Once design, engineering, and manufacturing were integrated, a new question emerged: how to turn years of accumulated engineering experience, the capabilities built while serving individual customers, into a platform that could serve many more innovation-driven companies. In Wu's view, the hardest part of hardware innovation is turning an idea into a product that can be manufactured at volume, a process that requires technical engineers, process engineers, and CAM engineers working together, and it is precisely the core capability KINGBROTHER has built up over the long term. In 2016, the company began shifting toward becoming a public technology platform for hardware innovation, and in 2023 KINGBROTHER reached a strategic partnership with Huawei Cloud. As AI accelerated its move into industry, this path advanced one step further.

In 2026, the company's Zaowu Digital Technology subsidiary launched InZ Pilot, an assistant for design engineers that converts the IPDM technology and engineering experience accumulated over the years into digital capabilities that can be called on and reused. In Wu's view, AI applications are gradually extending toward terminals and the physical world, with intelligent hardware an important direction for deployment. KINGBROTHER's core strategy has long centered on edge computing; going forward, the company will build on PCB and IPDM and, around edge computing and intelligent hardware, focus on scenarios such as automotive, power, and the low-altitude economy, while also tracking emerging directions such as embodied intelligence and exploring the path of IPDM + AI.

The Next Five Years

Standing at the five-year mark since listing, Wu laid out the plan ahead: stay specialized in the industries it serves and disciplined about its products, push IPDM and AI digital capabilities to converge, and consolidate the company's accumulated process R&D and engineering-services experience into platform capability to serve more hardware-innovation needs. This continues the main thread that has run through KINGBROTHER for nearly three decades. The company has always done the same thing, helping customers turn ideas into products faster, except that the form of that capability is now expanding beyond single-point delivery into a full platform.