Commercial aerospace revenue has plunged by nearly 80%, what is Super-Joint Co., Ltd. betting on via its RMB 246 million capacity expansion move?

While downstream rocket enterprises are still tackling the "model finalization" and "first flight verification" tasks, upstream manufacturers that have prepared production lines in advance must take the lead in facing the dual tests of heavy asset depreciation and order gap periods.

On November 4th, Superjet Co., Ltd. disclosed a record of investor relations activities.

Faced with inquiries from institutions about the sharp decline in revenue from the commercial aerospace business, the management gave the following explanation:

Most of the product models of downstream customers have not been finalized yet, and have not entered the stage of large-scale launch. At present, the company still focuses on small-batch supply.

The previous three quarterly reports have quantified this gap. In the first three quarters of 2026, the operating revenue of Superjet Co., Ltd.'s commercial aerospace business was 7.1044 million yuan, accounting for 1.11% of the company's total revenue.

In the same period of 2025, this business recorded a revenue of 31.7322 million yuan, accounting for 5.27% of total revenue.

Within one year, the revenue of this sector in the first three quarters shrank by 24.6278 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 77.6%.

It is thought-provoking that the sharp contraction of current financial data has not stopped Superjet Co., Ltd. from making heavy investments in the manufacturing end.

According to the fundraising feasibility analysis report disclosed by the company in September, its high-end equipment supporting production base expansion project plans to invest about 246 million yuan to expand the production and testing capabilities of core structural parts such as rocket tanks, shell sections, and fairings in Chengdu and Shanghai.

The current revenue is less than 10 million yuan, but the long-term expansion investment is nearly 250 million yuan. This mismatch between financial reality and capital expenditure hits the most real survival state of China's current commercial aerospace industrial chain.

While downstream rocket enterprises are still tackling the "model finalization" and "first flight verification" tasks, upstream manufacturers that have prepared production lines in advance must take the lead in facing the dual tests of heavy asset depreciation and order gap periods.

01

The Missing 24 Million Yuan Revenue: Seasonal Fluctuation or Slow Acceptance?

For Superjet Co., Ltd., whose main business is automotive fasteners and connectors, commercial aerospace was originally a highly anticipated "second growth curve".

Although this business accounts for a small proportion of total revenue, the year-on-year drop of nearly 80% still exposes the instability in the early stage of new business expansion.

The turning point of financial data appeared in the first half of this year. In its 2026 semi-annual report, Superjet Co., Ltd. attributed the revenue decline to "seasonal characteristics", because the model technical verification and launch plans of downstream private rocket enterprises are mostly concentrated in the second half of the year, resulting in a lag in the confirmation and delivery of upstream supporting orders.

However, by the end of the third quarter, the expected "concentrated release in the second half of the year" did not appear on the books. The cumulative revenue of only 7.1044 million yuan in the first three quarters indicates that seasonal factors alone can no longer fully explain the decline of the business.

Rocket structural parts are all customized, and when the upstream factory can record the revenue completely depends on the R&D rhythm of downstream rocket companies. Superjet Co., Ltd. did not disclose the specific contract details, and the missing more than 24 million yuan in revenue is most likely stuck in two links:

First, customers' purchases during the R&D period are unstable. Before the rocket is finalized, it follows the mode of "manufacture one, test one". If there happened to be centralized delivery of large customers in the same period last year, the revenue will appear very high; once customers modify the design or postpone the launch this year, the procurement will naturally stop.

Second, the products have been manufactured but not yet accepted and settled. After the rocket parts are manufactured and delivered, they often need to cooperate with the full rocket to complete the test, and the revenue can be truly recognized only after the customer signs the acceptance sheet.

If many products this year are still stuck in the testing or waiting for acceptance stage, they can only be recorded as inventory on the books first, and no revenue can be reflected.

02

The Industrial Gap from "Successful Launch" to "Batch Order Placement"

During the survey on November 4th, the management of Superjet Co., Ltd. gave two seemingly contradictory statements: on the one hand, it stated that most of the downstream customers' rocket models have not been finalized; on the other hand, it emphasized that many rocket companies have achieved successful launches this year, and the main models are gradually moving towards finalization.

The outside world often believes that a successful rocket launch means that the upstream supply chain is about to receive batch orders. But in actual industrial manufacturing, there is still a considerable distance between these two things.

First of all, after a single test flight succeeds, the design drawings may not be completely finalized. The test flight only verifies the feasibility of the specific scheme. After the flight, rocket companies usually continue to modify the structure and optimize weight reduction according to the test data.

Once the downstream drawings are modified, the upstream factory needs to re-match everything from material procurement, tooling and fixture adjustment to welding parameter setting.

As long as the design scheme is not finally finalized, the factory cannot start standardized mass production, and can only maintain high-cost, low-efficiency single-piece trial production.

Secondly, the current launch frequency cannot be directly converted into the factory's current revenue. The rockets launched at the launch site today, their shell sections and fairings are often manufactured and delivered as early as half a year or even a year ago.

The supplier's current book revenue depends on whether the customer has placed a purchase order for the next batch of rockets. Using the current launch quantity to calculate the supplier's current financial performance essentially ignores the time difference between production and delivery.

This special state in the trial production stage is directly reflected in the operation of the production lines. Superjet Co., Ltd. has completed two riveting production lines for large rocket structural parts in September this year, which can produce products with a diameter of 3.5 meters to 5.2 meters; but when asked about the capacity utilization rate in November, the company said that "it is difficult to simply quantify it at this stage".

The reason is not complicated. In the stage of scattered orders and iterative design, the production lines need to be frequently shut down to switch tooling and adjust processes, and cannot operate continuously like mature automotive component assembly lines. The traditional capacity utilization indicator is indeed difficult to measure at this moment.

03

Behind the 246 Million Yuan Expansion: The Thrilling Leap from Riveted Shell Sections to Welded Tanks

If the existing two riveting production lines are not fully utilized, why does Superjet Co., Ltd. invest another 246 million yuan in expansion?

By disassembling the feasibility report of the fund-raising project released in September, we can see that the company's real strategic intention is not only to expand the scale, but also to supplement core categories, to complete the process leap from dry zone structural parts to wet zone tanks.

The body structure of a liquid rocket mainly consists of three parts: tanks, shell sections (cabin sections) and fairings. Among them, the inter-stage section, tail section and fairing belong to the "dry zone" that does not directly contact the propellant, and mainly adopt aluminum alloy riveting or composite material process;

The tank is used to store cryogenic propellants such as liquid oxygen, liquid methane or liquid hydrogen, accounting for more than 60% of the total weight of the rocket body structure, with the highest value and the most stringent technical barriers.

Before that, Superjet Co., Ltd.'s Chengdu base mainly adopted the riveting process, and its products were limited to shell sections and fairings. In the 246 million yuan expansion plan, the company clearly arranged the production lines in two locations:

The Chengdu base will continue to strengthen the mass manufacturing capacity of riveted structural parts such as shell sections and fairings, with an estimated annual revenue of about 194 million yuan after reaching full production;

The Shanghai base will focus on planning the production of tanks, shell sections and fairings, supplement the core welding and testing processes, with an estimated annual revenue of about 235 million yuan after reaching full production. As of November 4th, the Shanghai production line is still under construction.

Entering the tank manufacturing field means that Superjet Co., Ltd. must conquer a series of hard-core processes such as friction stir welding (FSW) of large thin-walled aluminum alloy components, high-precision CNC machining, hydraulic and air-tight test, and foreign matter control.

The heavy gantry equipment, special welding machines and special testing workshops corresponding to this part of the production lines are exactly the bulk of this 246 million yuan capital expenditure.

From the perspective of supply chain competition, this heavy asset investment has its inevitable logic:

In order to reduce supply chain management costs, commercial rocket prime manufacturers are increasingly inclined to adopt "section-level general contracting" procurement. If a supplier can only manufacture riveted shell sections but not welded tanks, it will be at a disadvantage in the future competition for the seat of core supplier of main models.

In addition, the customization of special equipment, plant construction and process certification cycle lasts up to 1.5 years, so upstream enterprises cannot wait until downstream rocket companies issue hundred-launch-level batch orders to start buying equipment and building plants.

But from the perspective of financial soundness, this is a typical "cost first, revenue lag" gamble.

The estimated total annual revenue of about 429 million yuan (194 million yuan in Chengdu + 235 million yuan in Shanghai) after reaching full production in the fund-raising report is based on the optimistic assumption that the low-orbit satellite constellation will be deployed on a large scale, and the main rocket models of downstream customers will be successfully finalized and launched at high frequency.

Once the 1.5-year construction period is over, hundreds of millions of yuan of plants and equipment will be transferred to fixed assets, and the newly added depreciation and amortization every year will be rigidly included in the cost; if the model finalization progress of downstream customers is postponed again at that time, the new production lines will directly face the risk of idle capacity and impairment.

04

Will Reusable Rockets Reshape the Structural Parts Accounting?

In addition to capacity expansion, the evolution of downstream technical routes is also reshaping the commercial logic of rocket structural parts. At present, the main under-development models of leading domestic private rocket enterprises all take "first-stage vertical recovery and reuse" as the standard configuration.

In the communication on November 4th, the management of Superjet Co., Ltd. gave an optimistic interpretation of this trend, believing that the recovered rocket sections need to undergo strict testing, repair and local structural part replacement, which will bring high-gross-margin "after-sales maintenance" business to the company;

On the other hand, after the reusable technology reduces the launch cost, it will stimulate the launch frequency to grow exponentially, and the new manufacturing demand for consumable parts such as the second stage (usually not recovered) and fairings will increase significantly instead.

This logic is self-consistent in theory, but when it comes to actual commercial contracts and financial models, Xingdong Wuji believes that there are still three unverified variables:

First, the dilution effect of the procurement frequency of newly manufactured parts. Before the rocket achieves ten or even dozens of reuses, the initial reuse attempts will inevitably be accompanied by a reduction in the new procurement volume of some first-stage tanks and shell sections.

Whether the high-frequency consumption of the second stage can fully hedge the decline in the new manufacturing demand of the first stage in the short term depends on the actual launch schedule density of the prime manufacturer.

Second, the ownership of testing and repair business. The non-destructive testing, structural fatigue assessment and local replacement after the first-stage recovery are directly related to the success or failure of the next launch.

In the early stage of model reuse, private rocket companies are very likely to complete the core maintenance links in their own final assembly plants in order to accumulate engineering data and control the quality boundary, and may not immediately outsource them to upstream parts manufacturers on a large scale.

Third, the pricing power and scale effect of after-sales maintenance. Even if the maintenance business is outsourced, the local repair of a single rocket is a typical non-standard scattered operation, which is difficult to spread the fixed cost like mass production of new parts on the assembly line. At present, there is no mature financial sample in the whole industry to show how much net profit this model can contribute.

The performance twists and turns and counter-trend expansion of Superjet Co., Ltd. in the first three quarters of 2026 actually provide a very representative slice for observing China's commercial aerospace industry.

In the past few years, the focus of commercial aerospace has always been on the financing amount, engine test runs and first flights of downstream prime manufacturers. When the industrial chain begins to transition to large-scale manufacturing, the real test shifts to the upstream supply chain.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Xingdong Wuji", author: Julian, published with authorization from 36Kr.