Against the background of China’s gradient cultivation policy for specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative (SRDI) enterprises and the continued implementation of the “Made in China 2025” strategy, niche upgrading has become an important route for small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises to overcome low-end lock-in and achieve high-quality development. Taking Haibo Electric, a provincial manufacturing single-champion enterprise and national SRDI “little giant” enterprise, as the core case, this study integrates ecological niche theory and enterprise life-cycle theory and constructs an analytical framework based on niche width, niche fitness, and niche overlap. Owing to data availability, the empirical part uses a single-year cross-sectional sample of six enterprises in Yantai. Case analysis, exploratory DEA and SBM measurement, descriptive comparison, and qualitative evidence coding are adopted to identify the main factors related to niche upgrading. To improve reproducibility, the data are classified into publicly disclosed data, interview or internal-document data, and estimated data; estimated values are clearly marked and used only for exploratory comparison. The findings suggest that technological innovation, human-resource allocation, market expansion, policy support, industrial collaboration, and entrepreneurship may jointly support niche upgrading, while green development and digital transformation may constitute a dual-support path for improving niche fitness and expanding niche width. The conclusions are exploratory and should be further tested with larger samples, comparable industries, and multi-year panel data.
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