The first thing you notice is what's missing: No solid wood. No spruce top, either, and no rosewood back. In a workshop in Huiyang, a district of Huizhou, Guangdong province, a guitar is being tested that looks like the instrument you know but doesn't behave like one at all.
The guitar is made of carbon fiber. And somewhere inside, a chip is quietly doing the work of an entire band.
This is what Hu Haiming, founder of the Chinese smart instrument brand Enya Music, has spent the past decade arguing for.
"The quality of a guitar primarily depends on its sound quality, user experience and its adaptability to different scenarios, not just the type of wood used," he said.
That conviction has been the company's compass since 2011, when it set up shop in Huiyang and began pouring resources into new materials and smart hardware later. Hu is blunt about why.
"Sticking to traditional solid wood manufacturing will never allow us to catch up with high-end overseas brands — the only path forward is through innovation in new materials and technologies to create proprietary core products," he said.
The ground he's standing on has a longer history than the technology might suggest. Huiyang's guitar industry began in the early 1990s, when businesspeople from China's Taiwan island opened factories in the district. For years, those factories made guitars for other brands. The profit margins tell the story: Single-product margins hovered around 5 percent.
"The lack of an independent brand and pricing power, coupled with the limitations in the production capacity of solid wood materials and unstable yield rates, severely restricted the industry's development," Hu said.
His answer was to build outward. Drawing on the supply chain advantages of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the company set up three research centers — in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong, and in the United States — devoted to composite materials and intelligent interaction technology.
Three years of work produced the Enya NEXG in 2021, the world's first carbon-fiber smart guitar. Then, in 2024, came the Cyber, capable of simulating the sounds of more than 20 instruments. "Coupled with an intelligent interactive system, the Cyber guitar significantly lowered the barrier to entry for music, helping realize the concept of one guitar as an entire band," Hu said.
The market responded. During Amazon Prime Day in June, the company hit the top of the online giant's global sales charts in three categories at once — electric guitars, acoustic-electric guitars and ukuleles.
Its achievements reflect a bigger picture: Guitar companies in Huiyang have done well in the international market, as the nation's manufacturing industry continues to upgrade.
After more than 30 years, the district has built a complete guitar supply chain. Within a two-kilometer radius of Qiuchang subdistrict, raw materials, components and production equipment can all be sourced in one stop. But the reliance on original equipment manufacturing, or OEM, with thin margins and a long grind at the low end, had become impossible to ignore.
As a result, Huizhou Quanfeng Recreation Products suspended all of its OEM business in 2020 and threw its weight behind its own brand, Farida. Years of manufacturing experience and the support of foreign technical consultants gave Farida a fast foothold.
"We are now making full efforts to enter the high-end market," said Cai Laifeng, the company's chairman.
