We estimate capacity utilization, technical efficiency and equipment utilization of ten key industries in manufacturing industry by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) with the panel data from 2001 to 2014.The results show that there is a serious overcapacity problem in some of China’s manufacturing industries. Some traditional industries have low production capacity utilization like nonmetallic mineral products, ferrous metal smelting and rolling processing industry. However, some emerging industries, such as communications equipment, computers and other electronic equipment manufacturing and so forth have relatively high utilization. Through the analysis of influencing factors of overcapacity in the manufacturing industry, we found that there is a significantly positive correlation between market demand and capacity utilization while there is a significantly negative correlation between capital intensity, employment level, openness, financial support and capacity utilization.