Who Owns SharkNinja? A Cayman Company, a Hong Kong Shareholder, and No Factories at All

The company that beat Dyson on American shelves is registered in the Cayman Islands, controlled by a Chinese soy-milk-machine founder, and owns no factories.

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이 글의 한국어판 → 샤크닌자 주인은 누구? 케이맨 등기, 홍콩 국적 최대주주, 공장은 0개

FY2025: $6.4 billion in revenue, $701.4 million in net income, 4,143 employees — and, by the company’s own account, no factories of its own.

On the thirteenth of February, 2025, Mark Barrocas was asked whether his company would start making vacuum cleaners in the United States. Tariffs were coming. Everybody was asking. Barrocas runs SharkNinja, which overtook Dyson in the American vacuum market in 2014 and had spent the decade since being described as an American success story.

His answer was not diplomatic.

"Our industry doesn't exist in the U.S.," he said. "The product is not made here. The components are not made here." And then, in case the point had not landed: "We don't believe the U.S. right now is a viable supply location."

He was not being evasive. He was being unusually precise. SharkNinja does not make its products in America because SharkNinja does not make its products anywhere. Its most recent annual report says so in a single clause, buried in the business section, in the flat voice of a filing: Although we do not manufacture any of our own products, we have relationships with various third-party suppliers to manufacture our products.

That is one of six answers. The other five are stranger.

S&P Dow Jones Indices set out in 2023 how it treats a company whose only foreign feature is where it registers for tax. SharkNinja joined the S&P MidCap 400 on 18 May 2026.

The yardstick

In April 2023, S&P Dow Jones Indices published a clarification about which companies count as American for the purposes of its American stock indices. It was a housekeeping document. But it contained a phrase worth keeping.

Sometimes, S&P wrote, the only thing suggesting a company is not American is where it files its taxes — a domicile of convenience. In those cases, the index committee will normally decide the company is American anyway.

On the eighteenth of May, 2026, SharkNinja joined the S&P MidCap 400. It is a constituent of an American index. It is also, on the cover page of its annual report, under the heading (State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization), a company of the Cayman Islands.

Hold onto that phrase. We will need it at the end.

This series asks six questions of every brand. SharkNinja answers four. It will not state where it was born, and it does not count the people who make what it sells.

Where is SharkNinja?

The question sounds simple and it is not. This series asks it of every brand on the American shelf by filling in six boxes: where it was born, where it is incorporated, where the headquarters is, who owns it, who actually makes the thing, and who pays the wages. Most companies answer four or five of the six without difficulty.

SharkNinja leaves two of them blank. And it leaves them blank in opposite directions — one because it will not say, and one because it does not count.

Box one: born where, and when?

Ask the internet and you will be told that SharkNinja began in Montreal in 1994, when a young man named Mark Rosenzweig founded Euro-Pro Operating LLC, carrying forward a family sewing-machine business his grandparents had started in 1954. It is a good origin story. Three generations, a sewing machine, an immigrant city.

The company does not tell it.

Search the FY2025 Form 10-K — 2.4 megabytes, filed in March 2026 — for Euro-Pro, for 1994, for Montreal. None of them appear. What the filing does say about the company's birth is this: SharkNinja, Inc. was incorporated in the Cayman Islands on May 17, 2023 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of JS Global. By that account the company is three years old.

The corporate website is no more forthcoming. It offers "a proud history as a pioneer in small household appliances" and "a legacy that dates back several decades." No year. No city.

So where does 1994 come from? From Wikipedia, whose footnote for the claim points to a 2020 blog post by a marketing agency. Where does 1954 come from? From two secondary write-ups, neither of which cites anything at all — though one of them supplies the grandparents' first names, which is the sort of detail that makes a story feel documented without being documented.

There is one primary trace, and it is a strange one. In August 2003 the Federal Trade Commission published an early-termination notice, filing 20030875, for an acquisition in which Euro-Pro Holdings LLC acquired several businesses from an individual named Mark Rosenzweig. Among the entities named: Omega Sewmac, Inc.

Sewmac. It is not much. It is a company name with sewing machines inside it, sitting in a federal antitrust notice, and it is the only public document that connects this company to that story. It also shows something the retellings skip: that in 2003, the operating businesses were reorganized under an American holding company.

A company that does not print its founding year on its own website is doing something on purpose. What it is doing becomes clearer once you look at the next box.

Box two: incorporated where?

The Cayman Islands, and the paperwork agrees with itself at every level. The employer identification number begins with 98, the prefix the IRS assigns to foreign entities. The CUSIP begins with G, the letter reserved for non-US issuers. The EDGAR database records the state of incorporation as E9, which is the code for Cayman.

When SharkNinja listed in 2023, its prospectus said plainly: We are a "foreign private issuer" as defined under the U.S. federal securities laws. Foreign private issuers file lighter, slower disclosures. SharkNinja filed Form 20-F for 2023 and for 2024.

Then, in a registration document filed in March 2026, this sentence: The Company determined that, effective July 1, 2025, it was no longer a foreign private issuer. The FY2025 annual report is the company's first Form 10-K. Its first 8-K came in February 2026. Its first proxy statement came in April.

The transition left fingerprints inside the company. In the 2026 proxy, a director named Barney Tianhao Wang is recorded as having stepped off the compensation committee on the last day of 2025 — in connection with our transition to a domestic filer.

So: a Cayman company that files as an American one, sits in an American index, and was for its first two public years neither. None of this is illegal, unusual, or hidden. All of it is on the cover page. The question is what it means, and we are not ready to answer that yet.

Box three: headquarters

89 A Street, Needham, Massachusetts. This is the least complicated box, and even it has a wrinkle.

SharkNinja does not own the building. In July 2018, MetLife bought the 247,542-square-foot property for $96.5 million. SharkNinja is the tenant. The company that decides what America vacuums with makes those decisions in leased space.

Box four: who owns it?

Here is where the story stops being about paperwork.

The largest shareholder of SharkNinja is a man named Xuning Wang — CJ Xuning Wang in the filings — who made his money in China building soy-milk machines. His company, Joyoung, is a household name in Chinese kitchens. In 2017 a consortium he led bought the American appliance maker. In 2019 the parent listed in Hong Kong. In 2023 it spun the American business onto the New York Stock Exchange.

As of the thirty-first of March, 2026, Wang beneficially owned 54,787,426 shares — 38.7 percent. His citizenship, as recorded on the Schedule 13G, is Hong Kong. He holds most of it through two limited partnerships, JS&W Group Holdings and JS&W Asset Holdings, both of which are themselves organized in the Cayman Islands. He is chairperson of the board. The company's own title for him is Refounder.

There is no dual-class share structure. One share, one vote; the proxy says so. What there is instead is a single clause in the articles of association, and it is worth reading in full:

CJ Xuning Wang, for so long as he and/or his affiliates continue to remain beneficial owners of at least 30% of the Company's issued and outstanding shares, shall have the right, but not the obligation, to appoint one director to the Board.

He has used that right to appoint himself.

The other thing worth noticing about the ownership box is the direction it is moving. At the separation in July 2023, Wang held 57.0 percent. By the end of that year, 54.7. By September 2024, 49.5. By March 2026, 38.7. His stake has fallen by roughly eighteen points in under three years, most recently through a sale of 5.5 million shares at $116.00 apiece in August 2025. In none of those sales did the company receive a dollar; they were secondary offerings, seller to buyer.

Eight point seven points of cushion remain above the thirty percent threshold in the charter.

And what of JS Global, the Hong Kong parent? It owns nothing. Its own 2024 annual results state that it distributed all of the shares of SharkNinja Group it held to its shareholders in July 2023. That is worth being exact about, because it is widely got wrong: the 2023 listing was not an initial public offering. There was no offering. JS Global handed its holding to its own shareholders as a dividend in specie — one SharkNinja share for every twenty-five JS Global shares — and the shares began trading on the thirty-first of July. SharkNinja raised no capital. It simply appeared.

JS Global is still listed in Hong Kong under the ticker 1691, still controlled by Wang, still selling Shark and Ninja products across Asia outside mainland China. It does so under licence. The royalties run from Hong Kong to the American company, capped at twenty-eight million dollars for 2026.

The Chinese company pays the American company for the right to use the brands the Chinese company used to own.

Box five: who makes it?

Nobody who works for SharkNinja.

The filing is unambiguous — we do not manufacture any of our own products — and it names no factory it does own, because there are none. What it names is a geography: These suppliers are responsible for the assembly of our products and are primarily based in China. We also work with certain suppliers in various regions across Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia.

That sentence was filed in March 2026. Keep the date, because it sits awkwardly against a year of headlines announcing that SharkNinja had left China.

Follow what the company actually said, in order.

February 2025: Barrocas tells Fortune that ninety percent of US volume will be out of China by the second quarter, nearly all by year end.

August 2025: we have now achieved our goal of enabling approximately 90% of our U.S. volume to be produced outside of China.

February 2026: Today, we have the ability to manufacture nearly 100% of our U.S. volume outside of China.

Enabling. Ability to. Not a single one of these sentences claims that any particular unit was made anywhere. They claim capability. And in May 2026, when tariff rates on China and on Southeast Asia converged, Barrocas explained what the capability was for:

All of our top SKUs resourced at more than 1 factory, most of our SKUs are sourced inside of China and outside of China.

The company did not leave China. It built the option of leaving China, and then used the option in both directions. As of August 2026 the minimum tariff assumptions in its own guidance are 12.5 percent for China, Vietnam and Thailand, and 10 percent for Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia — a spread of two and a half points. Barrocas has described moving production between factories over price disputes the way a buyer describes switching suppliers of anything: There may be a factory that is pushing us more on price, and we've had to move some of that production to another factory that is willing to not push on price, but wants more volume.

The company has never published what share of its volume is made where. It has been asked. It answers in capability.

Two more details make the shape of this box visible. First: every unit of inventory the American company buys, it buys from its own Hong Kong subsidiary. After the separation, we purchase 100% of our inventory from one of our subsidiaries, SNHK. Second: of the five Southeast Asian countries named in the filing, exactly one — Vietnam — contains a SharkNinja legal entity. Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia contain suppliers and nothing else.

The tariffs, incidentally, have a number attached to them, and it is the only hard dollar figure the company has ever put on the subject. In the third quarter of 2026 SharkNinja submitted refund claims of approximately $247.1 million to US Customs and Border Protection, following the Supreme Court's invalidation of the tariffs imposed under emergency economic powers, and CBP accepted them. The company says the underlying duties split roughly evenly between fiscal 2025 and the first half of 2026 — which, against reported revenue, works out to something under two percent of sales in the first period and something under four percent in the second. (That is my arithmetic, from the company's two figures.) The government is appealing. The money has not arrived.

When SharkNinja raised its 2026 guidance in August, about forty-four percent of the increase in expected adjusted EBITDA was the refund.

Box six: who pays the wages?

Four thousand one hundred and forty-three people, in approximately thirteen countries and thirty-one offices, as of the thirty-first of December, 2025. The number has grown by 58 percent in four years.

The company will tell you how many of them sell (over 300) and how many market (over 283) and how many engineer and design (over 700). It will not tell you how many are in the United States. There is no country breakdown in the 10-K. There is no state breakdown. There is no headcount for Needham anywhere in any document the company has published.

The most granular figure available is in the 2025 ESG report, which is not a securities filing: 44 percent North America, 20 percent Europe/Middle East/Africa, 35 percent Asia Pacific. Applied to 4,143, that is roughly 1,800 people in a North America that includes Canada and Mexico, and roughly 1,450 in an Asia Pacific that includes China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan and Korea in a single undifferentiated bucket.

There is one more number the company does not publish, and it is the important one: how many people make the products.

It publishes an audit percentage instead. Ninety-five percent of its original equipment manufacturers were audited under the SMETA protocol during 2025, with full coverage targeted within eighteen months, and the audits found high compliance with our standards and no zero-tolerance findings. That is a ratio. The denominator — how many factories, employing how many people — appears in no filing, no ESG report, and no modern slavery statement.

The one place the supply chain's depth becomes faintly visible is the conflict minerals disclosure, which reports templates returned by 90 percent of surveyed suppliers and 216 smelters and refiners identified. It does not say how many suppliers were surveyed.

Two more figures from the wage box, both new. Mark Barrocas was paid $17,845,830 in 2025, of which thirteen million dollars was a single item the compensation committee called an Exceptional Leadership Bonus, awarded in part to offset his tax exposure from the separation. And the ratio of his pay to that of the median SharkNinja employee — who earned $94,076 — is 190 to 1.

That ratio appeared for the first time in 2026. Before this year, SharkNinja was a foreign private issuer and did not have to publish it. There is no earlier figure to compare it with, because there is no earlier figure.

The strongest case against everything above

It would be easy, and wrong, to leave it there. So here is the best version of the other argument, in its own language.

Almost nothing in this piece is unusual. Cayman incorporation is close to standard for a spin-off with an Asian parent and a global shareholder base; it is a tax and structuring choice, not a hiding place, and the company's disclosure of it is on the cover page of every filing in plain type. Outsourced manufacturing is not a loophole, and the company states it on the record in its own filing rather than burying it. A 38.7 percent holder with one board appointment right and no super-voting shares is a less concentrated structure than most founder-led American companies, and that holder has been steadily selling, not buying. The company files as a domestic issuer, is regulated accordingly, sits in an American index by the index provider's own reasoning, is run from Massachusetts, books two-thirds of its revenue in the United States, and employs more people in North America than anywhere else. Its thirteenth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth was reported in August 2026: revenue of $1.77 billion, up 22.2 percent. If a company like this is not American, the word has stopped doing any work.

That argument is strong. I think it is right about most of what it claims. It is right that none of this is concealment.

But it answers a question I did not ask. I did not ask whether SharkNinja is American. I asked where it is.

The judgment

Six boxes. Here is what came back.

Born: unstated. Incorporated: Cayman Islands. Headquarters: leased space in Needham, Massachusetts. Owned: 38.7 percent by a Hong Kong citizen through two Cayman partnerships, with a charter clause holding at thirty. Made by: companies whose names are not published, in a country the filing still calls primary, by workers the company has never counted. Wages paid to: 4,143 people, none of whom make anything.

Two of the six are blank. The company will not say where it was born, and it does not count the people who build what it sells. Everything else is disclosed, accurately, in public documents, by a company that has broken no rule I can find.

Which brings back the phrase. S&P Dow Jones Indices, writing about companies whose foreignness consists only of where they register, called it a domicile of convenience — and then decided such companies are American anyway.

Read that carefully and it is not a description of SharkNinja. It is an admission about the category. The people who maintain the boundary of "American company" have written down, in public, that the boundary cannot be drawn from the documents. They need a committee to draw it, case by case, on the grounds that the documents are merely convenient.

The documents are not lying. They are convenient. That is different, and it is the whole point.

There is a version of this story in which the villain is the Cayman Islands, or a Chinese shareholder, or a company that beat Dyson with cheaper vacuums and a decade of five-star reviews. I do not think any of those are villains, and this piece has not argued that they are. What I think is that the question "where is this company from" has quietly stopped having an answer, and that the most honest party in the whole arrangement was the chief executive on a February morning in 2025, being asked whether he would bring production home.

"Our industry doesn't exist in the U.S.," he said. "The product is not made here."

He meant the vacuum cleaners. It turns out to be true of more than that.