The sustainable development of China’s financial leasing industry is a growing concern among scholars. This paper analyzes the development data of China’s financial leasing industry from 2008–2021, using the dimensions of scale, speed, efficiency, structure, and quality. By employing principal component analysis, we construct the development index of China’s financial leasing industry and analyze the reasons for changes in the development level of the industry from the internal structure of the index. The study finds that scale serves as a key factor in the development of China’s financial leasing industry. While the contribution value of the structure factor shows fluctuations, the contribution values of the return and risk factors remain relatively stable. Using the ARIMA (Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) prediction model based on the principal component analysis, we establish the prediction model of the financial leasing industry change in the coming years. The study reveals that the financial leasing industry has entered a period of transformation, where the growth rate of its scale has dropped. Furthermore, this paper offers proposals to address the increasingly prominent asset-liability maturity mismatch problem, promote business structure optimization, enhance the contribution value of the structure factor and the income factor, and facilitate sustainable, higher-quality industry development.

In recent years, more and more real enterprises speculate and arbitrage in the financial market by participating in financial institutions, and the financialization of micro enterprises has become a general trend. However, the empirical conclusions of existing literature from different dimensions of enterprise development are not consistent. This paper uses the data from Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share companies from 2007 to 2019 to perform an empirical analysis on the market and institutional motivations of the entity enterprises’ sharing and holding financial leasing companies (SHFL). It is found that the fundamental reason for enterprises to SHFL is the profit gap between the financial industry and the real industry. The more intense the industry competition, the lower the profit rate, the larger the spread, and the stronger the incentive to SHFL. In addition, the continuous improvement of the national system construction in the financial leasing industry has played an essential role in promoting it. In the heterogeneity analysis, it is found that private enterprises are also motivated to ease financing constraints except interest rate spread. On the contrary, they are not significant in the sample of state-owned enterprises. Equipment manufacturing industries have both narrowing interest rates and equipment promotion motivation, while the non-equipment manufacturing industry has no such characteristics. Finally, the limitations and future research directions of this paper are discussed.