A Study on the Current Development Status and Challenges of SMEs in the Context of the Marine Economy

The marine economy has become an important growth pole for China's high-quality economic development and a key support for regional coordination, industrial upgrading, and high-level opening-up. Against the background of continued expansion of the marine economy and the optimization of industrial structures, small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs), by virtue of their organizational flexibility, specialized division of labor, and rapid market responsiveness, have gradually become major actors in extending marine industrial chains, absorbing regional employment, and promoting the transition from old to new growth drivers. Drawing on enterprise life-cycle theory and focusing on the practical context of marine economic development, this paper systematically examines the functional positioning of SMEs in the marine economy, their stage-specific characteristics, their practical difficulties, and their development trends in the era of globalization and digitalization. The study finds that SMEs in the marine industrial system perform both basic supply functions and more strategic roles in experimentation, model iteration, and regional spillovers, while also facing multiple constraints, including financing difficulties, shortages of talent, insufficient innovation capability, rising costs of green transformation, and relatively weak positions in industrial chains. As global competition in marine industries is restructured and digital technologies penetrate more deeply, the competitive advantages of marine SMEs are shifting from resource possession and cost advantages toward technological capability, data capability, coordination capability, and brand capability. In the future, it will be necessary to combine differentiated policy support, stage-specific assistance, a stronger innovation ecosystem, and better public services in order to promote higher-quality and more sustainable development of SMEs in the marine economy.