The Cni is top one without any doubt, and founded in around 1996, sponsored by CUST, the changchun university of science and technology, cni is a half-state owned enterprises and it only becames Top 1 manufacturer in around the year 2002, 2003, coz the Chinese goverment began to invest millions of RMB every year to support CNI to develop a widest variety of lasers, and that's why it develops much faster than
Scitower(another top laser manufacturer in China, sponsored by Northwest University, which has top laser facilities and research center. )
But cni didnot become the top 1 until 2002, it's not the competitive laser manufacturer in China. The predecessor & partner of Scitower, the named Fengyuan Laser inc.(dissolved already) in Zhejiang province, has a much bigger marketshare among the universities and labs.
Jetlasers is a young team founded in recent years and comprised of a group of young engineers graduated from the universities and labs in shandong provinces(north China), and they're also partnering with cni and scitower in some ways. Anyway, they're a much younger team but their portable lasers are known with more features than the cni. The fame of jetlasers rises a lot since 2008.
Viacho(located in Peking) included, all main top laser manufacturers are located in northern China. While laser sellers in southern China, esp, in Guangzhou, Zhejiang province are well known for making cheap duplicates, using the ld and crystals cheaply made in their workshop or somewhere. Copyright is ‘copy is right' :undecided:in China, so nothing has changed though cni sued them a couple of times. O-like and rayfoss are just two famous examples of reselling these cheap copies or duplicates and you can find a lot of similar resellers online. Cni wanna monopolize the high-end laser market and tried to have them banned but duplicates stuff are everywhere in China and thanks to it, we have some more options.
There seems to be only one famous laser manufacturer in Fujian province(southern China), named GaoYi, which has been partnering with US army for years, and it's heard that this manufacturer contributes a lot to the development of military laser weapons in US these years.
Just my knowledge of these companies and keep me accountable.