Effectively resolving overcapacity is an important means for China to stimulate economic vitality and break through development bottlenecks. It is also an important path for China to achieve the “double carbon” goal and high-quality economic development on schedule. Under the tide of digital economy, the digital transformation of enterprises brings the optimization of production mode and the accurate connection between supply and demand, which may become an important driving force for the resolution of excess capacity and the high-quality development of enterprises. However, the existing research lacks in-depth exploration on the micro path of the impact of digital transformation on enterprise capacity utilization.

Based on the text analysis of the annual reports of listed manufacturing companies to measure the degree of digital transformation, this paper examines the impact of digital transformation on enterprise capacity utilization and its mechanism. It is found that digital transformation has significantly improved enterprise capacity utilization, and the conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests and endogenous tests. The mechanism analysis shows that digital transformation mainly promotes the improvement of enterprise capacity utilization by promoting technological innovation, improving the level of internal control and alleviating information asymmetry. The heterogeneity analysis shows that among enterprise samples in regions with strong intellectual property protection and a high level of information infrastructure, non-state-owned and labor-intensive enterprise samples, and enterprise samples with low financing constraints, digital transformation has a stronger effect on improving enterprise capacity utilization. The economic consequence analysis shows that digital transformation ultimately improves the business performance and environmental performance of enterprises by improving enterprise capacity utilization.

The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it brings the development of digital economy and supply-side structural reform into a unified research framework from the micro perspective, and deeply analyzes the relationship between digital transformation and enterprise capacity utilization, which enriches and expands the economic effect of digital transformation, and also provides new ideas for resolving supply-side overcapacity from the micro level. Second, it identifies and empirically tests the micro mechanism of the impact of digital transformation on enterprise capacity utilization, and explores that digital transformation can affect enterprise capacity utilization through technological innovation, internal control and information asymmetry, which expands the existing research. Third, based on the characteristics of enterprise level and regional level, it analyzes the heterogeneous effect of digital transformation on enterprise capacity utilization, and further explores the final economic consequences of digital transformation on enterprise capacity utilization, which not only provides an accurate reform direction for digital economy to boost the quality improvement of supply system, but also provides empirical evidence for digital technology to enable the real economy and lead the high-quality development of economy.