Abstract:With the increasingly fierce contention marine resources and space, marine equipment manufacturing (referred to as MEM) industry to become a strategic pillar industry of the coastal countries and regions. In the context of broad market prospects and favorable policy, the coastal provinces set off a building boom of marine equipment base. From the three support aspects of the industry, market demand, industry and the development environment,the paper build a model and index system to evaluate MEM development potential, apply AHP and correlation coefficient method to evaluate marine equipment manufacturing industry development potential, the results show that: there is a big gap of the relevance between various indicators and industrial development potential, improve the industrial development environment can effectively increase the development potential; the MEM development potential in coastal areas have different sources, clearly regional advantages is contribute for coordinating regional resources configuration to realize rapid and healthy industrialization; using K-means clustering analysis, the coastal provinces divided into three classes according to the development potential is conducive to regional industrial development pathway choices.