Observation on the Survival Status of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the Surface Treatment Industry in 2025

Currently, China's surface treatment industry exhibits a notable pattern of a "large market, small enterprises" structure. As a fundamental supporting industry for key manufacturing sectors like automotive, electronics, and aerospace, its market scale is vast and continues to grow. However, the vast majority of participants within the industry are SMEs with limited scale. Data shows that enterprises with registered capital under 2 million RMB account for over 70%. Entering 2025, the survival status of these SMEs, intertwined with the waves of macro industrial upgrading and micro operational pressures, is characterized by "overlapping pressures" and "diverging pathways."

Multiple Pressures Create a Harsh Survival Environment
The pressures faced by small and medium-sized surface treatment enterprises are multidimensional and concrete. The primary pressure stems from continuously tightening environmental regulations and rising compliance costs. Guided by the "Dual Carbon" goals, national and local standards for pollutant emissions are becoming increasingly strict, directly threatening the phase-out of traditional high-pollution processes such as cyanide and chromium-containing treatments. For SMEs that historically underinvested in environmental protection facilities, this necessitates an expensive round of equipment updates and process upgrades. For instance, the evolution of international standards like the EU's REACH regulations also adds compliance costs for export-oriented enterprises. Secondly, market competition is exceptionally fierce. A large number of SMEs are long concentrated in mid-to-low-end sectors like traditional electroplating and ordinary spraying, leading to severe homogenization of products and services. This results in cutthroat price competition, severely compressing profit margins, with some companies seeing their gross margins fall below 15%. Additionally, volatile prices of raw materials (e.g., nickel, copper) directly erode already thin profits, posing a significant operational risk.

Finding Breakthrough Paths in the Cracks
Despite severe challenges, new demands arising from downstream industrial upgrading are also opening up differentiated paths for survival and development for SMEs. Many are shifting from passive reaction to active transformation. The first path is focusing on becoming "specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative." Some enterprises avoid head-on competition with industry leaders by deepening their expertise in a specific niche process or sector, such as specializing in precision silver plating for new energy vehicle circuit connectors or special coatings for the semiconductor field, building barriers based on technical depth. The second path is embracing technological upgrading. Intelligence and green transformation are no longer optional but essential for survival. Introducing automated production lines, AI visual inspection systems, etc., can enhance efficiency and stabilize quality. Simultaneously, proactively developing or adopting environmentally friendly processes like cyanide-free electroplating and water-based coatings is not only for compliance but also for building future-oriented core competitiveness. The third path is integrating into industrial clusters and collaborative ecosystems. Faced with the high cost of building independent environmental protection facilities, moving into surface treatment industrial parks, such as those in Huizhou Boluo or Hebei Zhuozhou, has become a rational choice for many SMEs. These parks provide unified centralized treatment and resource recovery for wastewater and exhaust gas, significantly reducing the environmental burden and operational risk for individual enterprises. Furthermore, models like the "Yong Lian Hui" in Hunan Yongzhou and the "shared workshop" in Hebei promote resource integration and synergistic efficiency across the industrial chain through platforms for supply-demand matching or shared production facilities, allowing SMEs to access orders, technology, and even production capacity at lower costs.

Observation Conclusion and Outlook
In summary, SMEs in the surface treatment industry in 2025 are in a period of deep reshuffling. The traditional model relying solely on low-price competition while neglecting environmental protection and technological upgrading is becoming unsustainable. Those that survive will be enterprises capable of keenly capturing the trends of downstream industrial transformation (e.g., new energy vehicles, high-end electronics) and decisively developing their own unique value in specialization, green transformation, or intelligence. Concurrently, the organization of the industry is undergoing profound change, moving from "dispersed operations" to "cluster operations." The trend towards park-based and platform-based models for resource sharing and risk sharing is reshaping the survival ecosystem for SMEs and injecting new momentum into the high-quality development of the entire industry.