Caitong: The cleanroom industry landscape shows clear divergence, with engineering contractors forming strong ties with owners.

Caitong released a research report stating that the cleanroom industry overall presents a competitive landscape of high-end concentration and low-end fragmentation, with leading manufacturers enjoying significant profitability advantages. By region, Europe, the US, Japan, South Korea, and China Taiwan have relatively high competitive barriers, while Southeast Asia and mainland China markets are relatively open; the technical and delivery experience requirements of high-end projects create strong ties between engineering contractors and owners. Caitong's main points are as follows: The cleanroom industry landscape shows clear divergence, with leading manufacturers enjoying significant profitability advantages By region, Europe, the US, Japan, South Korea, and China Taiwan have relatively high competitive barriers, with owners mainly choosing locally established engineering contractors. Southeast Asia and mainland China markets are relatively open, with engineering contractors from different regions competing together. From the owner's perspective, the technical and delivery experience requirements of high-end projects both create strong binding relationships between engineering contractors and owners, so cleanroom engineering contractors with existing cooperation experience have greater advantages in subsequent capacity expansion. Against this backdrop, the industry overall presents a competitive landscape of high-end concentration and low-end fragmentation. Among A-share companies, L&K Engineering, relying on its parent company's high-quality customers, achieves gross margins of over 25% on overseas projects, standing out in profitability and per-capita efficiency; Shenzhen Sed Industry and Wuxi Taiji Industry, as large state-owned enterprises, rank among the top in business scale by virtue of their advantages in undertaking large domestic EPC projects; Acter Technology Integration Group and Both Engineering Technology are deeply engaged in cleanroom system integration and electromechanical engineering, and the accumulation of high-quality projects and professional engineering orders is expected to further drive profitability improvement. In addition, Shenzhen Ridge Technology, Suzhou Gold Mantis Construction Decoration, Zhejiang Yasha Decoration, and other enterprises are extending into cleanroom business by leveraging their existing engineering and project management capabilities, and are expected to cultivate a second growth curve. Cleanroom competition styles vary across different global regions Cleanroom markets in Europe and the US are both dominated by European and American engineering contractors (Exyte, Jacobs, etc.), with the US accelerating the concentration of advanced logic, memory, and advanced packaging capacity, while European demand comes more from power semiconductors, analog, and specialty processes; Japan and South Korea have strong domestic engineering systems, with South Korea's core wafer fab construction deeply involving owner group-affiliated engineering platforms (Samsung C&T, SKecoplant, etc.), while Japan relies on its mature comprehensive construction and equipment engineering system to form strong local advantages (Kajima, Fujita, etc.); China Taiwan's TSMC continuous capacity expansion drives the development of local engineering contractors such as Hantang, Asia King, and Marketech, and promotes their going abroad with customers; Southeast Asia has relatively few large local semiconductor owners, with new projects mainly invested by overseas owners, and engineering contractors mostly entering with existing customers; mainland China has both local semiconductor enterprises such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and ChangXin Memory Technologies, as well as Taiwan-funded and foreign-funded enterprises such as TSMC and Samsung building fabs in the mainland, driving domestic, Taiwan-funded, and foreign-funded engineering contractors to jointly participate in local project construction. Among cleanroom engineering contractors, L&K Engineering leads the industry in profitability and per-capita efficiency From a profitability perspective, L&K Engineering and other Taiwan-funded engineering contractors perform relatively well, mainly benefiting from high-quality customer resources and high value-added segments. Among them, L&K Engineering's 2025 net profit margin reached 18%, far exceeding the industry average (8%), with per-capita revenue and profit of 5.78 million and 1.05 million yuan respectively, also at the industry's top level in per-capita efficiency; Shenzhen Sed Industry and Wuxi Taiji Industry's general contracting covers more equipment procurement, civil construction, and construction subcontracting segments. The two companies' revenue scale is at the industry's top, but their comprehensive profit margins may be dragged down by segments such as civil construction, and their profitability is also significantly weaker than the former; Acter Technology Integration Group and Both Engineering Technology's customers and projects cover multiple downstream fields including mature processes and new displays both domestically and internationally. Currently, high-quality large semiconductor projects have a relatively limited driving effect on overall profitability, but as the customer structure gradually optimizes, there is still significant room for improvement going forward. Risk warnings: macroeconomic fluctuation risk, semiconductor capacity expansion falling short of expectations, customer concentration risk, overseas project execution and policy change risk