亿华通1.94亿奖补纠纷背后，四家龙头企业营收集体下滑，氢能行业的“补贴病”该治了Behind SinoHytec's RMB 194 Million Subsidy Dispute: Four Leading Firms See Revenue Fall Together, and Hydrogen's 'Subsidy Disease' Needs a Cure

According to Green Fuel International Business Network, Foshan Feichi recently sued SinoHytec in court, seeking to establish the ownership of RMB 194 million in government award and subsidy funds, after a SinoHytec subsidiary had earlier sued Foshan Feichi to recover RMB 162 million in payment for goods. A chain of mutual debt—you owe me, I owe him, he owes you—finally cracked open in court, exposing the funding predicament long masked by subsidies in the hydrogen industry.

This dispute is not an isolated event. In 2025, four leading hydrogen enterprises saw their revenue fall across the board, with combined net losses of about RMB 2.088 billion. Among them, Guohong Hydrogen's revenue fell 32.2% to RMB 300 million, SinoHytec to RMB 259 million, Guofu Hydrogen Energy to RMB 346 million, and Refire to RMB 595 million. Losses became the norm while profit became the exception, and the "awards in place of subsidies" policy in practice distorted market order instead.

SinoHytec's financial data is the most direct evidence. As of the end of 2025, the company's book balance of accounts receivable was RMB 1.988 billion, accounting for 29.50% of total assets, with receivables aged over one year making up as much as 90%, and accumulated bad debt provisions of RMB 903 million. A company with annual revenue of only RMB 259 million had nearly RMB 2 billion in uncollectible receivables on its books, reflecting a payment system failure across the entire industry.

More serious is that the market itself is shrinking. In 2025, fuel cell vehicle production and sales fell 47% year on year; the five demonstration city clusters set a combined target of 33,000 vehicles but actually completed 15,800, a completion rate of less than 50%. SinoHytec's average fuel cell system price fell to RMB 2,163.56/kW, and the gross margin of its system business turned from positive to negative at -19.82%. A price war of this intensity shows overcapacity, insufficient demand and a business model that has yet to work.

"Awards in place of subsidies" was a policy introduced by five government departments in 2020, under which enterprises first advance money to produce and sell vehicles and then wait for subsidies to arrive. This "advance first, subsidize later" approach keeps cash flow perpetually tight, leaving upstream and downstream players in the industry chain able to do nothing but extend credit to and default on one another. As of March 2025, 45.4% of the award funds for the five demonstration city clusters had still not been allocated. If the money cannot be collected, the next deal cannot be done.

Policy is shifting, but enterprises cannot afford to wait. In March 2026, three departments raised the four-year award ceiling for a single city cluster to RMB 1.6 billion, adopting a "points system" instead of direct cash subsidies—the direction is right, but the pace is slow. SinoHytec invested RMB 30 million in December 2025 to set up an energy storage subsidiary and enter long-duration energy storage, while Refire narrowed its losses through cost reduction. When a single government subsidy can be claimed by two enterprises at the same time and end up in court, it shows that a business model reliant on subsidies has reached a junction where change is unavoidable.