I. Size Up the Market First: Equipment Sales Return to Growth, but the Lead Role Has Changed

According to the industry-report methodology of the China Laser Industry Development Report, China's laser equipment market recorded sales revenue of about 95.8 billion yuan in 2025, up 6.8% year on year, and is expected to reach around 102.5 billion yuan in 2026. Separately, under Zhiyan Consulting's methodology, China's laser processing equipment market was about 89.9 billion yuan in 2024 — the two figures cover different statistical scopes, but point in the same direction: after the downturn of 2023–2024, the industry has returned to positive growth.

Structurally, laser cutting remains the largest single segment, with the cutting equipment market at about 36.85 billion yuan in 2024, roughly 39% of laser processing equipment. But the real incremental growth is no longer in general-purpose cutting: PCB laser processing driven by computing-infrastructure buildout, optical communication components, and pan-semiconductor precision processing are replacing photovoltaics and lithium batteries as the fastest-growing line items on equipment makers' income statements. For upstream sales professionals supplying this industry chain, the first lesson of 2026 is this: the customer list has not changed, but who among those customers is spending money has.

II. Fiber Laser Localization: From a War of Substitution to a War of Position

Fiber lasers are the heart of laser cutting and welding equipment, and one of the most thoroughly localized links in China's manufacturing supply chain over the past decade. According to data cited by Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, localization rates show a clear gradient across power segments:

  • In the 1–3 kW segment, the domestic share reached 97.3% by 2022, with substitution essentially complete;
  • In the 3–6 kW segment, domestic penetration rose from 15.8% in 2018 to 95.7% in 2022;
  • In the 6–10 kW segment, domestic penetration was about 58.6% in 2022;
  • In the above-10 kW segment, domestic penetration rose from 5.7% in 2018 to 64.1% in 2022.

Looking back from 2026, the outcome of this substitution war has already been written into the companies' financial reports. Raycus Laser posted 2025 revenue of 3.467 billion yuan, up 8.43% year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 162 million yuan, up 20.52%; full-year laser unit shipments reached 186,000 units, with continuous-wave fiber lasers contributing 2.839 billion yuan in revenue, or 81.9% of the total. According to Qianzhan Industry Research Institute's figures, Raycus's share of China's domestic fiber laser market had reached 27% by 2023, overtaking IPG to become the domestic number one.

JPT has taken a different path: rather than competing in high-power cutting, it focuses on pulsed and precision processing. Its 2025 revenue was 2.074 billion yuan, up 42.66% year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 279 million yuan, up a sharp 110.11%; laser business revenue was 1.013 billion yuan, driven mainly by lithium-battery precision processing and consumer electronics demand. Maxphotonics is unlisted and does not publish periodic reports; by the company's own self-reported account, its 2024 laser sales value and shipment volume ranked first in China, and it has launched an 85 kW fiber laser for cutting, with its 160 kW industrial-grade product achieving a tested output of 170 kW — these figures are all self-reported by the manufacturer, unaudited, and for reference only.

The control group is the former absolute hegemon, IPG. In 2025, IPG's global revenue was about 1.0 billion US dollars, up only 2.7% year on year; more critically, its regional structure has shifted: China's share of revenue fell from historically close to half to about 28%, while Europe, at 35%, became its largest market. Multiple institutions estimate that IPG's share of the global fiber laser market has fallen to the 30%–40% range. For IPG, the Chinese market has gone from a cash cow to a position that must be defended.

What the war of position means is this: competition among domestic laser makers has shifted from "taking share from IPG" to "taking share from each other," with the contest now centering on in-house core-component capability, depth of vertical integration, and overseas channels. For upstream suppliers this means two things — domestic procurement volumes for laser chips, specialty optical fiber, pump sources, and optical components are expanding, while the supplier-qualification bar at the leading manufacturers is rising.

III. The 10kW Rollout: With Prices Cut by Roughly 80%, Cutting and Welding Enter the Standard-Equipment Era

The 10kW class was the fiercest — and most productive — battlefield of this round of price wars. As chronicled by 21st Century Business Herald, a 10 kW fiber laser sold for as much as about 2 million yuan in 2017; by 2021, domestic manufacturers had pushed the price down to about 400,000 yuan — a drop of roughly 80% in four years. As prices came down, volumes went up: industry-media figures show that about 21,000 fiber lasers of 10 kW and above shipped domestically in 2024, up about 40% year on year, with the domestic share expected to exceed 70% in 2025.

Raycus's 2025 annual report bears this out: shipments of lasers of 10 kW and above reached 8,561 units, up 26% year on year, and the company completed the commercial sale of the world's first 200 kW fiber laser in September 2024 — the arms race in single-unit power continues, with thick-plate cutting, shipbuilding, and heavy industry as the main destinations. For sheet-metal and structural-parts factories, a 10kW machine is no longer a luxury for a handful of large plants but a ticket to bid for orders — and the purchasing decisions of this replacement wave are spreading from provincial capitals to prefecture-level cities and county towns in industrial clusters.

Another adoption curve sits even closer to small and micro factories: handheld laser welding. Raycus shipped 51,920 handheld welding lasers in 2025, up 66.22% year on year. Handheld laser welders are replacing traditional TIG welding and penetrating metal-working sole proprietors and small township factories — the first time laser equipment has truly reached down into county-level markets.

For upstream sales professionals, the 10kW rollout and the handheld-welding downmarket push translate into a set of concrete incremental purchases:

  • High-power auxiliary components: cutting heads, focusing lenses, protective lens windows and other optical consumables wear out faster as power rises;
  • Cooling and dust extraction: 10kW-class machines come standard with industrial chillers and fume-purification equipment;
  • Assist gases: thick-plate cutting drives demand for bottled gas as well as on-site nitrogen and oxygen generation equipment;
  • Downmarket channel consumables: handheld welding torch heads, wire feeders, protective face shields and the like are entering a fast-moving, repeat-replenishment rhythm.

IV. Precision Lasers: Pan-Semiconductor and Computing Take the Baton from Lithium Batteries and Photovoltaics, with Stark Hot-Cold Divergence

If cutting and welding tell a story of mass adoption, precision lasers tell a story of divergence. The 2025 financial reports of the equipment makers read almost like a heat map of downstream demand.

On the hot end are computing and optical communications. Han's Laser posted 2025 revenue of 18.759 billion yuan, up 27% year on year and a record high; within that, PCB equipment revenue was 5.773 billion yuan, surging 72.68% year on year, a direct beneficiary of the high-layer-count and HDI board capacity expansion driven by AI servers; new-energy equipment revenue was 2.361 billion yuan, up 53.36%. A note on methodology is needed here: its net profit attributable to shareholders was 1.19 billion yuan, down 29.77% year on year, but its net profit excluding non-recurring items was 810 million yuan, up 82.28% — the profit decline stems mainly from a high base of non-recurring gains in the prior year, while core-business profitability actually improved. JPT's fiber-device business revenue grew 560.42% year on year, likewise feeding on the optical-communications capacity boom.

On the cold end are photovoltaics and lithium batteries. Dier Laser posted 2025 revenue of 2.033 billion yuan, up just 0.93% year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 519 million yuan, down slightly by 1.59% — photovoltaic cell and module laser equipment accounts for 98.55% of its revenue, and its fourth-quarter revenue fell 56.1% year on year, as the pressure of the deep adjustment in the photovoltaic main chain has now been transmitted to the equipment segment. Hymson has had it even harder: revenue for the first three quarters of 2025 was 2.704 billion yuan, down 25.47% year on year, with a net loss attributable to shareholders of 913 million yuan, versus a profit of 167 million yuan in the same period a year earlier — the retreat in lithium-battery equipment capital expenditure, compounded by impairment provisions, punched straight through the income statement.

The same beam of laser light: tied to AI computing, it is surging; tied to photovoltaic and lithium-battery capacity expansion, it is paying down debts. The equipment makers' responses are highly consistent: Dier Laser is pivoting toward pan-semiconductor directions such as TGV (through-glass via) and PCB laser drilling, Hymson is betting on solid-state battery laser processes, and JPT is expanding optical-communications component capacity. Pan-semiconductor has become the consensus next battleground for the precision laser segment.

V. For Upstream Suppliers: Who on This Industry Chain Is Placing New Orders

Translating the industry shifts above into the language of orders, the procurement hotspots along this chain in 2026 fall roughly into four categories:

  • Localization procurement by laser makers: Raycus, Maxphotonics, JPT and their peers are enlarging their domestic procurement baskets for laser chips, specialty optical fiber, pump sources, isolators and other core components, while raising the supplier-qualification bar — component factories that make it into the leading players' supply chains are eating the dividend of the new market structure;
  • Equipment makers' computing-direction expansion: Han's Laser added over two billion yuan of incremental PCB equipment sales in a single year, and the matching demand for galvanometer scanners, linear motors, motion platforms, machine vision, and precision-machined parts is expanding in step;
  • The installed-base service market for 10kW cutting and handheld welding: optical consumables, chillers, dust extraction, assist gases, and welding-torch accessories are entering a sustained replenishment cycle — customers are fragmented but repeat purchases are steady;
  • New pan-semiconductor production lines: TGV, advanced packaging, and panel-level processing equipment are still on the eve of volume ramp-up, and the window for getting onto supplier rosters now is the most valuable.

Conversely, equipment makers oriented toward photovoltaics and lithium batteries are shrinking capital expenditure and stretching payables cycles — pushing inventory in those two directions calls for extra caution. Seeing clearly which downstream a customer is tied to matters more than seeing the customer itself.

If you want to follow this map to concrete factory customers — from laser makers and cutting-head factories to sheet-metal job shops — you can use Tianxia Gongchang AI — Tianxia Gongchang (tianxiagongchang.com), a B2B platform covering 4.8 million Chinese factories — to search this industry chain's real, verified operating factories conversationally, by category and by region, across its database of 4.8 million real factories in active production.

VI. Notes on Data Sources

The data in this article come from public channels: the 2025 annual reports of Raycus Laser, JPT, Han's Laser, and Dier Laser, and Hymson's 2025 third-quarter report (listed-company disclosure figures, cross-checked against coverage by Securities Times, Eastmoney, OFweek Laser, Laser Manufacture News and other media); IPG Photonics' financial reports and SEC filings; market-size figures use two separate methodologies — the China Laser Industry Development Report and Zhiyan Consulting — each labeled where cited in the text; power-segment localization rates are cited from Qianzhan Industry Research Institute (2022 basis); 10kW-class shipment volumes and domestic share are industry-media figures; figures relating to Maxphotonics are company self-reported and unaudited. Statistical scopes differ across these sources; when comparing, please rely on the labels given in the text.