The water enterprise is the important economic entity with dual attributes of national public service function and market-oriented industry characteristic. At present, its development is facing major reforms and opportunities. How to objectively evaluate the current development status of water enterprises and to analyze the development strategy of China's water enterprises has become the primary issue. An evaluation system for the development of water enterprises is established, and the weight of each index in the evaluation system is determined by using the analytic hierarchy process. On this basis, the support vector machine and the polynomial kernel function are employed to evaluate the development of water enterprises. Then the factors which influence the development of water enterprises such as weak market competition, outdated management and low efficiency are found and analyzed. Finally, some countermeasures are put forward as follows: (1)Various regulatory means should be implemented to promote the steady industrialization; (2)Attention should be paid to the development of the production of water-saving facilities and service enterprises; (3)The management and technological innovation should be strengthened.