Recently, Hengtai Lighting, the first lighting company on the Beijing Stock Exchange, disclosed its 2025 annual report and 2026 first quarter report as scheduled. The dual-line operating data of double decline in revenue and profit throughout the cycle and a small quarterly loss accurately hit the current industry pain points in the foreign trade lighting track.
In 2025, the company’s annual revenue will be 554 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 22.84%, and the net profit attributable to the parent company will be a decrease of 39.84% from the same period last year, nearly 40%; the pressure will intensify at the beginning of 2026, with first-quarter revenue falling by 23.81% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to the parent company will turn negative and lead to periodic losses.
Putting aside the superficial performance data, this financial report is not only the business failure of a single company, but also the epitome of the common survival problems of small and medium-sized lighting manufacturers in the field of cross-border commercial lighting and industrial lighting.
1. The single overseas binding dividend has faded, and the ability of foreign trade lighting companies to resist risks is weak across the board
A review of Hengtai Lighting’s current performance has fallen sharply. The core trigger is not the lack of single product competitiveness, but the double impact of the long-term solidified overseas layout of a single region plus the two-way fluctuation of exchange rates. This is also a common fatal shortcoming of more than 70% of current small and medium-sized export-oriented lighting manufacturers.
The public operation dimension shows that Hengtai Lighting’s core revenue relies entirely on the deep expansion of the North American market. All categories of LED industrial and commercial lighting products adopt a unified settlement model in US dollars. There is no diversified overseas regional distribution layout and no multi-currency risk control hedging plan.
In 2025, the exchange rate of RMB against the U.S. dollar went through a trend of first weak and then strong fluctuations throughout the year. The rapid rebound of the exchange rate at the end of the year directly led to large exchange losses, and the financial expenses in a single year increased by an additional 10.3 million yuan year-on-year.
Looking at the entire lighting industry, the growth of the mature lighting demand market in North America has already reached peak saturation. New local terminal infrastructure and commercial supporting projects have been significantly reduced. Overseas buyers generally implement small batch, multi-frequency, and low inventory strategies, and the total number of cross-border orders continues to shrink.
The leading large-scale lighting companies have already deployed in emerging incremental markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East to hedge risks in advance, while most small and medium-sized manufacturers still stick to their original North American tracks and gather inward.
The old business model of a single market with a single settlement currency can steadily earn dividend profits during the industry’s upward cycle. However, once it encounters global economic fluctuations and exchange rate fluctuations, it will directly fall into a passive situation of declining revenue and shrinking profits, and its ability to resist cycles and risks is completely insufficient.
2. The stock involution superimposed on the legacy of quality control, squeezing the real profitability of physical lighting
The core profit indicators of the financial report intuitively reflect the underlying operating difficulties of the industry: Hengtai Lighting’s comprehensive gross profit margin is locked at 18.29% in 2025, a slight decrease of 0.36 percentage points year-on-year.
What appears to be a slight decline is actually a two-way combination of vicious involution in the industry and back-end quality control and after-sales costs, which directly compresses the profitability of corporate entities and is also the key reason why small and medium-sized lighting manufacturers are unable to improve quality and efficiency.
At present, the general industrial lighting and basic office lighting circuits have already fully entered the red ocean competition of existing products. Product technology, functions, and appearance are highly homogeneous. There are no core technical barriers to support them, and low-price orders are the norm in the industry.
In order to secure long-term cooperation with high-quality large customers, manufacturers can only passively lower their shipping quotations, and the basic profit margin of single products continues to narrow.
In addition, the legacy issues of early quality control that are easily ignored by the industry constitute a hidden erosion factor of net profit.
Hengtai Lighting clearly mentioned that some of the lamps shipped in batches in previous years had leftover customer complaints about workmanship defects. In 2025, they still need to continue to follow up on the closed-loop processing. Special targeted tiered price discount subsidies will be given to customers, which will increase hidden operating costs and further lower the overall profitability level.
This situation is a wake-up call for the entire industry: In the stage of large-scale mass production of lighting companies, if there is a lack of front-end factory quality inspection and control, it may seem to save short-term labor and equipment quality control costs, but it will inevitably backfire on operating profits in the form of after-sales compensation, loss of brand reputation, and decline in repurchase rates. The extensive production model is completely unsuitable for the current refined stock competition environment.
3. Disjointed production and marketing adaptation + extensive supply chain, concentrated exposure of inefficient operation shortcomings in the industry
In an environment where demand-side orders have dropped sharply and profitability continues to be under pressure, refined management and control of the supply chain and the ability to adapt production and sales flexibly have become the core watershed for the survival competitiveness of lighting companies. Hengtai Lighting’s financial report simultaneously exposed the shortcomings of supply chain operations common among small and medium-sized manufacturers.
The prices of core raw materials such as upstream LED chips, hardware accessories, and driving power supplies fluctuate in bands. The bargaining power for bulk purchases is weak. The internal production process control is extensive, and unnecessary consumables and labor energy consumption are severely wasted. The overall production cost remains high.
External market conditions have declined, internal cost control has failed, and two-way pressure has simultaneously squeezed the survival space of enterprises.
At the same time, traditional foreign trade lighting manufacturers have continued to use the old production and sales model of “pre-calculation and stocking, mass production, and concentrated export” all year round, and have not established a flexible production capacity deployment system.
In 2025, sudden reductions in overseas orders and on-demand procurement will hit, and large-volume standing inventories will be directly backlogged. The cost of warehousing management and cross-border logistics will increase additionally, further increasing the operational burden.
On the other hand, the leading compliance companies in the industry have already used digital supply chain management and control systems to link upstream and downstream to lock in the long-term bottom price of raw materials, schedule production on demand and accurately match orders, significantly reducing ineffective operating costs, and the polarization pattern has become increasingly obvious.
4. Anchoring the three-dimensional and stable approach, small and medium-sized foreign trade lighting manufacturers have a precise breakthrough path in 2026
In view of the existing operating pain points, Hengtai Lighting has anchored the three-dimensional direction of products, supply chains, and markets, and implemented measures that are in line with the actual situation of the industry. It also provides small and medium-sized foreign trade lighting manufacturers in the entire industry with a breakout scope that can be directly reused.
On the market side, the company quickly optimizes its global layout strategy and does not blindly expand its track across borders. It prioritizes consolidating existing high-quality customer groups in North America, simultaneously tests water at a low cost to develop cross-border e-commerce lighting channels in Southeast Asia, gradually disperses the risk of dependence on a single region, and uses basic exchange rate risk control tools to hedge exchange losses and steadily improve operational stability.
The product side has decisively jumped out of the quagmire of low-price homogeneity. Relying on the original mature production base of industrial and commercial licenses, we have developed differentiated new products with lightweight and intelligent sensors, energy saving and low consumption, and adaptability to complex working conditions. It accurately meets the special needs of overseas high-end factories and chain business scenarios, and uses product value to replace low-price orders.
Synchronously upgrade the factory quality inspection process across all links, resolve potential customer complaints in advance, cut hidden after-sales compensation costs from the source, and build a solid foundation for profitability.
The supply chain side integrates the resources of surrounding high-quality supporting manufacturers, refines the management and control of energy consumption and consumables in the entire production process, streamlines redundant job processes, effectively compresses comprehensive operating costs, and builds a strong back-end operation support line of defense.
Conclusion
Taken together, the pressure on Hengtai Lighting’s performance in this period is not due to the shrinkage of the industry track, but the normal pain of the lighting foreign trade track saying goodbye to extensive dividends and entering a high-quality and refined reshuffle cycle.
In the future, the industry will no longer return to the era of earning dividends. The four hard strengths of core technology, diversified risk control, efficient supply chain, and stable customer base will become the core foundation of the enterprise.
Only by taking advantage of the trend to adjust the business rhythm, make up for shortcomings and deepen the main business, can we survive the cold winter of the cycle, steadily seize the incremental share of high-quality cross-border lighting in the future market, and lay a solid foundation for long-term development.
