en.Wedoany.com Reported - The nonferrous metal construction industry is currently at a critical juncture of transformation and development. Affected by changes in traditional markets, the old growth model of the industry faces significant pressure. At the same time, emerging fields such as overseas resource development, green mines, intelligent smelting, and new energy continue to expand, opening up new development space for the industry. How to stabilize the fundamentals amidst adjustments and cultivate new drivers during transformation has become a key issue that the entire industry must address collectively.
According to statistics from the China Nonferrous Metal Construction Association, from 2023 to 2025, the revenue trends of the three major segments of the nonferrous metal construction industry (survey, design, and construction) showed clear divergence. The design segment was the only one to achieve positive growth in 2025, with total revenue increasing by 14.24% year-on-year. This not only reversed the decline seen in 2024 but also hit a three-year high, demonstrating strong resilience and recovery momentum. This growth was primarily driven by a significant expansion in overseas business (overseas revenue up 56.14% year-on-year, with its share rising to 26.61%) and a stabilization and recovery in demand for some high-end design consulting services within China. In contrast, total revenue for the survey segment continued to shrink, with a year-on-year decline of 3.05% in 2025. Although this was a slight narrowing from the -3.14% in 2024, it has yet to exit the downward channel. The construction segment faced the most pronounced downward pressure, with total revenue declining by 9.61% year-on-year in 2025, and an average annual decline of 8.48% over the three years. As the design sector stabilizes and achieves breakthrough growth, the situation for nonferrous construction enterprises in their core business is expected to improve in the coming years.
From a revenue source perspective, the proportion of overseas revenue across the three major segments of the nonferrous metal construction industry is on a continuous upward trend, but significant differences exist between segments. The design segment leads by a wide margin in terms of internationalization. In 2025, the overseas revenue share of design units reached 22.26%, an increase of nearly three percentage points from 2023 (approximately 19.47%). This high proportion is closely related to the nature of its business: design consulting is an intellectual-intensive service, with deliverables primarily consisting of drawings, technical solutions, and standards and specifications. These are less constrained by geography and facilitate cross-border delivery. Additionally, the "going global" strategy of Chinese mining enterprises has driven demand for supporting engineering design. Leveraging their technical advantages and long-term cooperation foundations, design units have achieved large-scale overseas business first. The overseas revenue shares of the survey and construction segments are relatively low, but their growth potential warrants attention. In 2025, the overseas revenue share for survey units was only 5.20%, and for construction units, it was 5.11%, both at single-digit levels. This reflects the high dependence of these two types of business on localized on-site operations. The gap in overseas revenue shares among the three segments essentially stems from differences in the tradability of their services. The "asset-light, high-tech, easy-to-transmit" nature of design services makes them naturally suited for global allocation; the "asset-heavy, highly localized, high-synergy" characteristics of construction enterprises determine a slower internationalization process requiring long-term deep cultivation; survey work requires on-site drilling, sampling, and field testing, with geological exploration deeply rooted in the field, necessitating equipment and personnel to follow the project, making cross-border remote delivery difficult compared to design drawings. Nevertheless, with the deepening of mining cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative and the continuous expansion of overseas equity production by Chinese mining enterprises, there remains significant room for growth in overseas business for both survey and construction.
At this stage, the industry is in a period of structural adjustment, with some indicators experiencing temporary declines. However, positive changes have emerged in multiple dimensions, indicating substantial future development potential.
First, overseas business is transitioning from a "supplement" to a "key growth engine," with vast internationalization prospects. In 2025, the overseas revenue share of the design segment reached 22.26%. Although the overseas shares for the survey and construction segments are only around 5%, the profit growth rate of their foreign-related businesses far exceeds that of domestic operations, with some enterprises achieving an average annual compound profit growth rate exceeding 55%. As mining cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative deepens and the overseas equity production of Chinese mining enterprises continues to expand, the demand for overseas services across the entire chain of survey, design, and construction in the nonferrous construction industry is set to grow substantially. The design segment, having established a scale advantage, can continue to play a leading role; while survey and construction started later, their growth momentum is clear, and they are expected to jointly build an overseas collaborative development pattern of "design leading, survey pioneering, and construction implementing."
However, overseas markets also come with higher risks. Factors such as geopolitics, compliance requirements, safety and environmental standards, and localized management can all impact the long-term sustainable development of enterprises' overseas projects. Therefore, nonferrous construction enterprises "going global" must not only focus on order volume but also enhance their capabilities in risk identification, compliance management, and project coordination.
Second, the proportion of senior talent is continuously increasing, and the demographic dividend is being realized. The industry is shifting from being "headcount-driven" to "talent-driven," with the core role of senior talent in technological innovation, project management, and international business becoming increasingly prominent. As the talent structure continues to optimize, per capita output value and profit are expected to further improve, and the talent dividend will become a core driver of high-quality industry development. In the future, the industry should continue to optimize its talent structure, increase the cultivation of young technical backbone, establish a composite talent echelon to meet the needs of overseas business and international competition, and improve compensation incentive mechanisms to retain core talent.
Third, R&D investment intensity far exceeds the average level of China's national manufacturing industry, with ample technological reserves. In 2025, the R&D intensity of the design segment was 6.36%, while both survey and construction segments stood at 3.92%. R&D focuses cover cutting-edge directions such as digital design, green exploration, intelligent construction, and BIM+GIS applications. High-intensity R&D investment has already stockpiled a number of key technologies and process packages for the industry. With increased policy support from China for strategic mineral resources, green and low-carbon development, and digital-intelligent transformation during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, the industry's technological advantages are expected to translate into market competitive advantages and new growth poles. The focus should be on strengthening industry-university-research-application collaboration and tackling key technologies in areas such as ultra-deep well mining, utilization of refractory ores, and smart mines.
Fourth, profits in some segments have shown a strong rebound, with significant room for optimizing profit models. As the business structure optimizes towards higher value-added projects, the overall profitability of the industry still has considerable room for improvement. The EPC model will profoundly change the industry's profit logic. The profit share from pure construction labor will face continuous downward pressure, while value-added services such as design, procurement, and operation and maintenance are expected to become new profit sources for the industry. To escape the predicament of low profits and involution competition, the core for enterprises is to change the way value is created. In the future, nonferrous construction enterprises can no longer rely solely on project volume for survival but must win the market through professional capabilities, management skills, technical expertise, and risk control abilities. Enterprises need to transform from traditional business contractors to full-cycle solution providers; from single project execution to integrated services covering design, procurement, construction, and operation and maintenance; from homogeneous domestic competition to differentiated tracks such as green mines, intelligent smelting, new energy, and overseas resource development; and from extensive management to lean, digital, and compliance-oriented management.
The entire industry must strengthen confidence, work hard, seize the strategic opportunity period of the 15th Five-Year Plan, shift the development focus from scale expansion to quality and efficiency improvement, change the competitive approach from low-price involution to capability competition, and transform the profit source from single construction labor to full-cycle value creation. Only in this way can nonferrous construction enterprises truly escape the low-profit dilemma, achieve high-quality development, and make greater contributions to safeguarding China's national resource security and serving the Belt and Road Initiative.
