Looking ahead to 2025-2030, the vacuum coating industry will exhibit green, high-end, intelligent, and diversified development trends driven by technological iteration, policy guidance, and downstream demand. Simultaneously, business models will continue to innovate, and the competitive landscape will be gradually restructured. Leading companies will focus on breakthroughs in core technologies and a complete industry chain layout, while small and medium-sized enterprises will need to rely on niche markets to achieve differentiated development in order to seize opportunities in industry upgrades.
I. Technological Trends: High-End Breakthroughs and Green Upgrades in Parallel
Technological iteration will become the core driving force for industry development. On the one hand, high-end coating technologies will continue to break through. Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) technology, with its extreme film uniformity and three-dimensional conformal properties, will gradually penetrate into high-end fields such as logic chips below 5 nanometers and third-generation semiconductors, becoming a core process in semiconductor manufacturing. Composite coating technologies will further integrate multiple principles such as evaporation, sputtering, and ion bombardment, breaking through the performance bottlenecks of single technologies and adapting to more complex high-end scenarios. On the other hand, green technology has become a key focus of transformation. Low-energy-consumption and low-emission roll-to-roll continuous coating and solvent-free coating processes will be promoted more and more. In 2027, the capacity of low-emission coating technology is expected to account for more than 60%, and the carbon emission intensity per unit output value will decrease by more than 35% compared with 2020. In addition, resource recycling technologies such as target material regeneration and membrane separation-electrodeposition coupling will continue to be optimized, the comprehensive recovery rate of metal resources will gradually increase, and the intensity of hazardous waste generation will further decrease, achieving multiple goals of "environmental protection + energy saving + resource recycling". The level of equipment intelligence continues to improve. Intelligent production lines integrating online monitoring, AI process optimization and digital twin systems will become the mainstream, helping enterprises to improve production efficiency and reduce film defect rate. Leading enterprises have begun to lay out the research and development and promotion of intelligent equipment [4]. II. Market Trends: Emerging Tracks Explode, Demand Structure Continues to Optimize Downstream demand structure will continue to be restructured, traditional application fields will steadily upgrade, and emerging application fields will become the core of growth. The new energy sector will maintain explosive growth. The industrialization of photovoltaic heterojunction cells and solid-state lithium batteries will drive a significant increase in demand for photovoltaic coatings and battery electrode/electrolyte coatings, with the demand from the new energy sector expected to jump to over 30% by 2030. In the semiconductor sector, as chips iterate towards advanced processes, the demand for high-precision, high-purity coatings continues to increase, driving the expansion of the high-end coating equipment and materials market.
In the consumer electronics sector, the widespread adoption of foldable screens and wearable devices is creating demand for flexible and wear-resistant coatings, driving the transformation of coating technology towards lightweight and flexible designs. In the automotive sector, the rise of new energy vehicles is increasing demand for automotive-grade wear-resistant coatings and transparent conductive coatings, while the trend towards intelligent vehicles is driving growth in demand for coatings for automotive optical components. Furthermore, the development of cutting-edge fields such as AR/VR and quantum materials will open up new application scenarios for vacuum coatings, further expanding the industry's market space.
III. Competition Trends: Domestic Substitution Accelerates, Pattern Gradually Reconstructed
The domestic substitution of my country's vacuum coating industry will enter an accelerated period. Policy support and increased corporate R&D investment will promote the independent control of core technologies and core components. Domestic enterprises will gradually break through the technological monopoly of foreign enterprises and achieve more breakthroughs in the fields of high-end equipment and materials. It is estimated that in the next five years, the localization rate of my country's high-end coating equipment will increase to more than 80%, and the import dependence of core materials such as high-purity targets and high-end coating solutions will be significantly reduced.
Industry competition will shift from homogeneous price competition to technology competition, patent competition and service competition. Leading enterprises will build technological barriers by increasing R&D investment and laying out core patents. At the same time, enterprises will accelerate globalization, expand overseas markets, and enhance international competitiveness. Small and medium-sized enterprises will gradually focus on niche tracks, such as photovoltaic coating and tool coating, and achieve precise positioning by relying on differentiated technologies and customized services to avoid homogeneous competition. In addition, industry integration will gradually intensify. Inefficient and high-pollution enterprises will be eliminated, and high-quality resources will be concentrated in leading enterprises, and industry concentration will continue to increase [4]. IV. Business Model Trends: From Product Sales to Full Life Cycle Service Transformation
The business model of the vacuum coating industry will continue to innovate. The traditional "equipment sales" model will be gradually upgraded, and the full life cycle solution of "equipment + consumables + service" will become the mainstream. Enterprises will improve customer stickiness and profitability by providing integrated services such as equipment operation and maintenance, process optimization, and consumable supply. At the same time, the innovative model of "pay-per-performance" will gradually emerge. Enterprises will charge service fees based on coating effect and production efficiency to achieve the binding of interests with customers and improve service quality and customer satisfaction.
Collaborative innovation has become an important direction for industry development. Enterprises will cooperate with universities and research institutions to focus on breakthroughs in core technologies and the development of new products. Enterprises in the industry will strengthen the collaboration of the industrial chain, integrate resources such as equipment, materials, and processes, and improve the overall competitiveness of the industrial chain. In addition, cross-regional collaborative innovation platforms will be gradually implemented to promote technology sharing, talent mobility and capacity optimization, and help the industry achieve high-quality development. In the future, enterprises with core technologies, a complete service system and a full industrial chain layout will occupy a dominant position in industry competition [4].
Post time: 2026-02-28 15:12:11