What is a gongban?

A gongban (公板, pronounced gōng bǎn, literally "public board") is a working factory reference design — a complete electronics product, ready to manufacture, that any Chinese factory can clone, brand, and ship.

Most consumer electronics you see on shelves in Europe and the US — the BLE locks, the air quality sensors, the smart plugs, the kids' tablets, the kitchen scales, the cheap action cameras, the budget e-bike controllers — were not designed from scratch. They started as a gongban.

This system runs in plain sight in Shenzhen but is almost invisible to Western founders. Understanding it changes how you think about hardware: pricing, timelines, suppliers, defensibility, and what your competitors are actually doing.

The plain definition

The everyday reality

Imagine a Western founder pitches an investor: "We're building a smart indoor air quality monitor with WiFi and a phone app." The investor pictures a hardware startup with electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, firmware developers, and 18 months of development.

The reality, in most cases, looks more like this: the founder flies to Shenzhen, walks through Huaqiangbei, and within three days has been shown four nearly identical air quality monitors, each made by a different factory, each based on the same gongban from a sensor manufacturer's IDH partner. The differences are cosmetic: the enclosure, the colors, the logo, the app branding. The PCB, the chips, the firmware structure — identical.

The founder picks one, places an order for 5,000 units with their logo, gets CE/FCC certifications (often pre-existing for the gongban), and ships in 90 days.

This is not a fringe case. This is the dominant production model for consumer hardware in the $1–500 price range coming out of China.

Who creates gongbans?

Three main types of organizations design and distribute gongbans:

• IDH firms (Independent Design Houses) — engineering shops whose entire business is designing gongbans and licensing them to factories. Some specialize in Bluetooth audio, some in IoT sensors, some in industrial SOMs. They make money on licensing fees, NRE (non-recurring engineering), or per-unit royalties.
• Chip vendors and their reference design teams — Realtek, Espressif, Rockchip, Allwinner, MediaTek, and similar Chinese silicon companies produce reference designs around their chips specifically to seed the gongban ecosystem. The more gongbans built on their chip, the more units they sell.
• Established factories with internal engineering — large EMS providers (Foxlink, Kingbrother, BYD Electronic) maintain libraries of their own gongbans, sometimes licensed in, sometimes designed in-house. These get offered to customers who walk in with a product idea.

How are they different from open hardware?

Both systems exist. They serve different audiences and different volume tiers. Open hardware is genuinely open — gongbans are commercially shared, which is a different thing. A gongban can become a product with millions of units shipped without any of its design ever being publicly documented.

Why this matters for Western founders

If you're a Western hardware founder and you didn't know gongbans existed, three things are probably true:

• You're overpaying for development. Quotes you got from US or EU design houses for "$200K NRE and 12 months" are pricing custom engineering. The equivalent gongban, properly sourced, can be available for licensing or per-unit royalty within 2–4 weeks.
• Your competitors already know. The hardware brands that seem to ship faster, undercut your pricing, and pivot faster — they're almost certainly building on gongbans. You're not being out-engineered. You're being out-systemized.
• Your "defensibility" claims to investors are weaker than you think. If your product can be cloned from a gongban inside three months, no amount of branding protects your margin once a competitor finds the same design house.

What you can do with this knowledge

Once you understand the system, three options open up:

• Buy in. License a gongban that fits your product idea, customize the enclosure and branding, and skip 12 months of development. You ship faster and cheaper than founders trying to invent from scratch. This is the dominant strategy for consumer hardware in the $20–200 retail range.
• Build around it. Use a gongban as the core electronics, but invest the saved development time and budget into software, brand, distribution, or a genuinely differentiated user experience. The IP is in the layer your competitors can't easily copy.
• Avoid the trap deliberately. If your product genuinely needs custom electronics — high-volume cost reduction, unusual sensors, specific industrial certifications — you can now negotiate with full information rather than being sold a gongban dressed up as bespoke engineering.

The point of this site is not to romanticize gongbans or to dismiss original engineering. The point is that the system exists, it's enormous, and ignoring it puts Western founders at a structural disadvantage they don't even know they have.

What's on this site

This site catalogs gongbans — both the commodity reference designs from the IDH ecosystem, and the industrial SOM platforms from established factories like Kingbrother. Each entry has technical specs, a category, and Hans's notes on what it's good for, where it fails, and how to think about sourcing it.

The catalog is small today and growing. The book — GONGBANS — covers the system, the economics, and how to navigate it as a founder. Hans is reachable at hansstam.eu for direct advisory work.