In 2025, China's construction machinery industry showed a trend of coordinated growth in both domestic and international sales, with overall steady growth. Domestic demand rebounded significantly, and the export market continued to play a supporting role. Only a few categories experienced a decline due to downstream demand, highlighting the industry's overall resilience.
In 2025, most major construction machinery products included in the statistics achieved year-on-year sales growth. Excavators and loaders, as the industry's two mainstay products, continued to play a stabilizing role, achieving year-on-year growth of 17% and 18.4% respectively. Tracked cranes, road rollers, pavers, and aerial work platforms performed particularly well, with year-on-year sales growth exceeding 20%, demonstrating strong growth momentum. Tower cranes and lifting work platforms continued to decline, with year-on-year sales decreasing by 30.7% and 28.6% respectively.
Domestic demand recovered strongly, but the market was uneven.
The overall growth driver in China's domestic market has shifted from traditional extensive investment to specific infrastructure sectors and equipment replacement demand.
Benefiting from the continued advancement of infrastructure construction in transportation and water conservancy, domestic sales of road rollers and pavers increased by 17.9% and 30.7% respectively throughout the year. Demand for crawler cranes and graders related to specific major projects (such as new energy construction and large-scale industrial projects) was strong, with domestic sales growth exceeding 30%. Demand in the logistics sector grew steadily, with domestic sales of truck-mounted cranes and industrial vehicles (forklifts) increasing by 8.47% and 12.6% respectively, reflecting the resilience of growth in manufacturing logistics and warehouse automation.
Tower cranes, closely related to real estate construction, saw a significant contraction in domestic market demand, with annual sales declining by 50%, reflecting the impact of the ongoing real estate market adjustment on the industrial chain. Domestic demand for lifting work platforms also suffered a sharp decline, with domestic sales falling by 42.4% year-on-year. Since 2024, the domestic high-lift crane market has entered a downward cycle, and there has been no sign of improvement.
Exports remained stable, supporting industry growth.
In contrast to the mixed performance of the domestic market, the export market demonstrated strong resilience, with the vast majority of product categories maintaining positive export growth. The export market has become the core engine driving industry growth.
In terms of market share, the export sales of graders, crawler cranes, road rollers, and aerial work platforms all far exceeded domestic sales throughout the year, demonstrating significant success in overseas expansion. Specifically, grader exports accounted for 82.4% of total sales, while road roller exports accounted for 62.8%.
Based on a high initial level, exports of most products maintained stable growth. Forklifts, as the largest single product category, saw exports exceeding 540,000 units throughout the year, a year-on-year increase of 13.4%. Exports of crawler cranes, truck-mounted cranes, tower cranes, road rollers, and aerial work platforms all saw annual growth exceeding 20%. Notably, despite a significant decline in domestic sales, tower crane exports bucked the trend, growing by 21.9%, but this was insufficient to offset the domestic shortfall. While the export base for aerial work platforms was smaller, the 51.6% growth rate indicates rapid overseas expansion.
December's data reflects year-end market fluctuations. Most products saw year-on-year sales growth, such as truck cranes (+38.1%), crawler cranes (+68.1%), truck-mounted cranes (+35.2%), and road rollers (+25.6%), demonstrating a strong year-end sales surge. However, domestic sales of tower cranes, pavers, aerial work platforms, and aerial work vehicles declined again year-on-year, and domestic sales of industrial vehicles decreased slightly by 5.17%, indicating weak year-end demand in some sectors. 2026 will still face certain challenges.
The construction machinery industry showed strong recovery momentum in 2025. The driving force for industry development has clearly shifted from high-intensity domestic investment to a greater reliance on global market expansion and technological upgrades to enhance competitiveness. With the accelerated implementation of infrastructure investment and equipment upgrade policies, the peak construction season for large-scale water conservancy projects, and the resilience of overseas market demand, the overall industry prosperity is expected to continue to rise in 2026.
