How to enter the high end bureau of new energy, environmental protection enterprises? Aoyama

Series of environmental protection industry breakthrough series of new energy vol1

Author of Castle Peak Research Institute

Introduction: Out of the car, vaulting, cannon.

Recently, several young friends have urged them to update and said that they want to read "hopeful" content, which is really a difficult problem. Tsingshan is a business think tank and first-class institution focusing on the environmental protection industry, objective and true is our purpose, hope is not woven from words, but follow the objective law.

Hope will come, but must first be based on reality, the reality of the environmental protection industry is to seek a breakthrough in the siege of the times.

In the life cycle of a company, there are no more than three kinds of crises: the company is still there, and the industry is gone; The industry is still there, but the work is gone; The job is still there, but the company is gone. The first has been staged in other fields, and will not appear in the field of environmental protection, and the latter two environmental protection enterprises are confronting.

In either case, its essence is "the change of the industry and the strain of the enterprise", the change is objectively and certain, the strain lies all in the enterprise, and if it can be adapted, it will be born, and if it cannot be strained, it will die.

Regarding the current changes in the environmental protection industry and the underlying context, Tsingshan Industry Review has published articles at the same time at each key node and key event in the past two years. The breakthrough of environmental protection enterprises is the top priority of environmental protection enterprises, and it is also the direction that Tsingshan will focus on next.

This article is about the release of the phased results of the game-breaking series, focusing on the direction of "environmental protection + new energy", and analyzing several paths of cross-border new energy for environmental protection enterprises in combination with cases.

For a long time, the conceptual limelight of new energy in the environmental protection industry has obscured the real underlying logic. When we walk into this topic, we clearly find that the joys and sorrows of the industry are different. New energy is the closest outlet to environmental protection, but not every player can go in the right direction at this crossroads.

Some of the enterprises that have entered this outlet have succeeded and some have failed, and the reasons for this are worth studying and refining. This paper will combine the case study of cross-border new energy of environmental protection enterprises, and deepen the addition rules of environmental protection and new energy.

The environmental protection "interface" on the new energy industry chain

The opportunities for new energy are so great that all industries want to come in and feel that they can come in. From the perspective of the environmental protection industry, new energy is indeed the nearest outlet.

Everyone is talking about new energy outlets, it seems that there is infinite scenery, and even the official website and promotional video of environmental protection companies do not write new energy, and the company's business model is outdated and incomplete.

So, what does it mainly mean when it comes to new energy in the context of environmental protection? What are the "interfaces" of the environmental protection industry in the steaming industrial chain of new energy?

Tsingshan Research Institute has systematically sorted out the two industries of new energy and environmental protection, and the "interfaces" are distributed in two aspects: on the one hand, photovoltaic, wind power, energy storage, etc.; On the other hand, there is the field of electric vehicles.

Photovoltaic, wind power, energy storage:

The photovoltaic industry chain is mainly divided into the main industrial chain and the auxiliary material industry chain, the main industrial chain mainly includes silicon materials, silicon wafers, cells, modules and photovoltaic power stations, and the auxiliary material industry chain is classified according to different production links, mainly including thermal field materials, diamond wire, silver paste, photovoltaic glass, adhesive film, inverter, bracket, combiner box, cable and so on.

After these years of development, the supply side of photovoltaic has gradually matured, and there is overcapacity, and the window period to enter the core link of this chain has passed. The opportunities for environmental protection enterprises lie in two main aspects:

First, on the downstream application side, most environmental protection enterprises are basically unable to participate, requiring enterprises to have strong capital and resource capabilities, and it is difficult to enter the bureau without a state-owned background; The second is to provide supporting services for pollution control for the industrial chain, which is interpreted in the case in Part 02 below.

The same is true for wind power, which is relatively far from environmental protection.

In terms of energy storage, pumped hydro energy storage, lithium battery energy storage and hydrogen energy storage are currently the most concerned.

From the perspective of the installed capacity of energy storage projects in operation in China, pumped energy storage is still the main energy storage method in China, accounting for 893%, and electrochemical energy storage accounted for 92%, lithium battery is a kind of electrochemical energy storage.

The domestic energy storage industry is currently in the early stage of commercialization, and is accelerating the high-quality and large-scale development of new energy storage. The "14th Five-Year Plan" New Energy Storage Development Implementation Plan puts forward development goals and key tasks by 2025, including the installed capacity of new energy storage to reach 30GW, the cost of electrochemical energy storage systems reduced by more than 30%, the ability of energy storage technology innovation to be significantly improved, and the basic formation of energy storage market mechanism and policy system.

In this direction, there are environmental protection enterprises in the development, one of which is the layout of China Tianying in the field of gravity energy storage

At the beginning of 2022, China Tianying obtained the exclusive gravity energy storage technology license from EV companies in China for up to 15 years, and at the same time cooperated to launch the first 100MWh gravity energy storage second-generation technology pilot project in Rudong, Jiangsu Province, which was recognized by the National Energy Administration.

Since 2022, China Tianying has successively cooperated with Three Gorges Construction Engineering, China Construction Seventh Bureau, China Power Construction, State Power Investment Corporation, etc., among which the gravitational energy storage project has orders of more than 7GWh. At present, the company's gravity energy storage business is mainly EPC, exporting technology and related equipment, and will also participate in the operation of some projects.

The large-scale rollout of gravity energy storage business is expected to enter the second growth curve of China Tianying.

Taking the field of lithium battery as an example, in the whole chain from raw materials to final application, environmental protection enterprises can participate in the links including "waste batteries" and "lithium raw materials".

At present, there are three main processes for lithium resource acquisition: spodumene lithium extraction, lepidolite lithium extraction and brine. Compared with the three technical routes, the high-quality resources of lithium concentrate are mostly concentrated in the South American lithium triangle and Australia, while the mature salt lakes are not only distributed in the South American lithium triangle, but also in Qinghai and the first region of China, which is the background of the sudden heat up in the first two years of the concept of "salt lake lithium extraction".

However, at present, these areas are also facing saturation and even involution, and according to the latest report of environmental protection inspectors, there are many environmental problems in the development of salt lakes, and the next step is to remediate. Obviously, this is a development process that we are very familiar with: explosion-saturation-involution-chaos.

The further extension of the industrial chain is the manufacture of batteries, which is largely out of the capacity boundary of environmental protection enterprises. Judging from the current situation, environmental protection enterprises have the potential to enter some links, but if they extend too long in the industrial chain, it is not realistic.

Overall, the wind on the new energy track is very strong, but the wind passes quickly, so fast that a large number of players only enter half a foot to face the involution, and the market may change dramatically within a few months.

This is an overview of the environmental protection "interface" in the new energy industry chain, which is carried out in combination with specific cases below.

"Environmental protection + new energy" chess game play:

Out of the car, vault, set up a cannon

At present, there are a number of cases of climate on the chessboard of "environmental protection + new energy", from the point of view of the way of attacking, "out of the car", "vaulting horse", "erection gun" are different, combined with specific cases to list several modes:

1. Relying on core resources, collaborative routes, case: Longjing environmental protection

Longking Environmental Protection is working hand in hand with its major shareholder Zijin Mining in the field of new energy, and one of the sectors is Zijin Mine Power Station Business.

At present, about 2GW of the company's projects have been recorded, and nearly 1GW of projects such as the first phase of 300MW photovoltaic in Wuqia County, Kezhou, Xinjiang, the first phase of 160+40MW wind and solar power station in Heilongjiang Duotong, Serbia and Guyana have been successfully constructed, forming a win-win business paradigm for Zijin and Longjing. At the same time, the company's energy storage battery pack and system integration project was completed at the end of August, and the Shanghang 5GWh battery cell project was capped, and the new energy storage contracts exceeded 1.2 billion in the third quarter.

The advantages are:

1. Good internal synergies. At present, Longjing's green power is mainly supported by Zijin Mining, the major shareholder, and the electricity price is mainly benchmarked against the industrial and commercial electricity price in the region, which has formed a high internal rate of return due to the large energy consumption of Zijin Mine.

2. Unique resource endowment. Zijin Mine's business is widely distributed around the world, and the mine has abundant land resources, which has unique advantages compared with other industrial and commercial scenarios, which provides great convenience for the acquisition of wind and solar power station resource indicators, and can launch projects of the order of 100MW and GW, which is much larger than the scale of tens of MW of general rooftop industrial and commercial projects.

For Longjing, Zijin Mining is a unique practice base and application scenario. Zijin's energy consumption volume and energy supply substitution space are huge. At the same time, considering the market-oriented promotion of carbon trading, this model has added a greater winning surface to the trend.

In addition, Longking itself is a leading enterprise in the field of air treatment, and has accumulated a number of core customer resources such as power generation groups and large industrial enterprises, which highly overlap with energy storage terminal scenarios.

2. Industrial chain layout, strong alliance, investment route, case: Weiming environmental protection

Weiming Environmental Protection is the enterprise with the highest market value in the field of environmental protection in China, and its main business is waste incineration power generation, and the other side of it is "energy". At present, the interface of Weiming environmental protection into new energy is lithium battery materials.

In 2022, Weiming Environmental Protection will lay out a high-ice nickel project in Indonesia, with a total annual output of 130,000 tons of high-ice nickel containing nickel metal, and officially enter the field of new material R&D and manufacturing.

In August 2022, Weiming Environmental Protection announced that the company invested in the construction of a lithium battery new material project with Shengtun Mining, Yongqing Technology (a holding subsidiary of Tsingshan Group) and Xinwangda. The project includes high-ice nickel refining, high-nickel ternary precursor production, high-nickel cathode material production and related supporting projects, with an annual output of 200,000 tons of high-nickel ternary cathode materials, forming an upstream and downstream industrial chain with the Indonesian high-ice nickel project, and realizing the business layout of the whole industrial chain from the raw material end to the sales end.

In September 2022, Weiming Hong Kong, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Weiming Environmental Protection, signed the "Joint Venture Agreement on the Annual Production of 50,000 Tons of High Glacial Nickel Containing Nickel Metal (Indonesia) Project between Merit, GEM Hong Kong and Weiming" with Merit Company and GEM Hong Kong.

In July 2023, Weiming (Singapore) Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the company, signed the "Construction of Indonesian Laterite Nickel Mine Smelting and Production of Nickel Raw Materials (Nickel Intermediates) for New Energy" (200,000 tonnes of nickel per year) project.

Judging from the actions that have been made public so far, the layout of Weiming Environmental Protection has two characteristics, one is to walk with professional players in the track, just like Tsingshan Group in Wenzhou, and have made heavy investment and layout, not a shallow try; The second is the coordinated layout of the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.

3. Joint R&D, technical route, case: Shanghai Xiba

In addition to the layout of the asset-heavy model, the other is the asset-light model that takes the technical route, one of which is Shanghai Xiba.

In November 2022, Shanghai Xiba and the team of researcher Zhang Tao of Shanghai Institute of Ceramics jointly established Shanghai Keyuan Guneng New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. to enter the field of solid-state batteries.

Prof. Tao Zhang graduated from the Department of Chemistry of Fudan University, majoring in physical chemistry, and has been engaged in research on new energy materials and their applications in power and energy storage batteries at Mie University and National Institute of Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, and joined the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015.

In 2021, through the study of the coordination chemistry of strongly polar groups on the surface of garnet-type electrolytes, the team of researchers Zhang Tao achieved a stable cycle of 250 cycles at room temperature with a capacity of 99%.

In January 2023, Shanghai Xibaguan WeChat News said that the industrialized standard production line of lithium-ion battery solid electrolyte powder from tonnage to tonnage jointly built by the company and Shanghai Ceramic Institute was successfully trial-produced at one time, and all indicators have reached the design standards, and it has now entered the stage of production line process optimization.

In addition, in December 2021, Shanghai Xiba and Academician Zhao Dongyuan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and professor of Fudan University, jointly established Shandong Fuyuan New Material Technology Co., Ltd. to research and produce mesoporous carbon conductive agents and silicon carbon anode materials.

The technical route is suitable for enterprises that do not have the advantages of capital and resources to break through the situation, to break through in other areas other than new energy, technology has increasingly become a key element, and some technology-based enterprises in the field of environmental protection can fully outline the development direction of the breakthrough on the technical path.

4. Environmental protection supporting services, old business new track, case: Shijing Technology

Another new energy opportunity that is closest to the environmental protection industry is the incremental environmental protection supporting services in the entire new energy industry chain, one of which is Shijing Technology, which is an environmental protection enterprise that has taken off by new energy.

Under the overall downward trend of the environmental protection sector in the past two years, Shijing Technology is one of the few companies that has achieved contrarian growth, and the company has achieved operating income of 21 in 2023Q1-Q38.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10976%。

The core reason is that benefiting from the high prosperity of the photovoltaic industry for many years, the pollution prevention and control needs of customers in the photovoltaic industry are growing.

At the same time, in 2022, Shijing began to lay out the photovoltaic cell manufacturing business, and continued to extend it, and in 2023, it will join hands with Wuxi Weixin to carry out the production and research and development of 6N-grade high-purity quartz sand.

Of course, due to the relatively weak position in the industrial chain and the large-scale expansion in the short term, the operating indicators such as cash flow, accounts receivable and profit margin of Shijing Technology need to be further optimized.

The above are several "environmental protection + new energy" models that Tsingshan Research has sorted out so far, and Tsingshan Research Institute will keep track of the further development and evolution of various models.

New energy is an emerging incremental track, which will release new opportunities, and the mode of gold mining is naturally not limited to the above situations; From the perspective of environmental protection enterprises, new energy is not the only breakthrough, but the underlying logic may be applicable to more enterprises and more directions.

For example, by analyzing the above-mentioned cross-border new energy cases, some common points can be extracted:

Relying on their own advantages and core competencies to plan actions, do not venture into completely unfamiliar fields; It has not been extended too much in the industrial chain, and the battle line is controlled within the range that ammunition can support; Entering the field at a relatively early stage, it is prudent enough to grasp the fighters; ......Due to space limitations, Tsingshan Industry Review will conduct a systematic analysis of this in subsequent articles.

Apocalypse: Move strategically forward, sink tactically

At present, environmental protection enterprises are generally facing the situation of exhausting the old road, and the demand for transformation and change is strong, and the road is difficult.

For many enterprises, this is an unprecedented problem, if ten years ago environmental protection enterprises to develop a strategy has a standard answer, then the current environmental protection enterprise strategy is not a standard answer. In general, the strategy must move forward, and the tactics must sink.

Judging from the existing explorations, there are some common ideas for solving problems that are worth referencing

1. "Environmental protection +" is the first formula to get out of the predicament

This article focuses on "environmental protection + new energy", and presents some paths and situations for environmental protection enterprises to enter the new energy track.

From this, we can extract the basic formula of "environmental protection +", new energy is one of the additive items, under this thinking, there can be other directions, which will be the direction that Tsingshan Research Institute will focus on in the future.

There are two keys to this, one is to jump out of the traditional boundary of environmental protection, and the other is to organically combine with the current business, and the development of new tracks can be based on existing business or resources.

The dilemma of the environmental protection industry is the dilemma of the times, and it can be found that all walks of life and enterprises have a strong need to break the situation, and they are also staring at other fields, and the era of seizing a new opportunity completely out of thin air is long gone.

It can be said that the vast majority of enterprises, including environmental protection enterprises, must use good "addition" to break the situation.

2. Transform capital power into scientific and technological power

We spend a lot of effort to break through the dilemma, break through, break the situation, etc., but the final point must all come back to the ability of the enterprise.

For a long time, among the many capabilities of environmental protection enterprises, resource management and capital are the core, and around these capabilities, a number of advantageous enterprises have been initially formed in the industry.

In the past 20 years of competition in the environmental protection industry, capital power has always been the core force of it; But to break the game and attack in the second half, capital power alone is not enough.

In the process of expanding from the existing business sectors, crossing borders, and looking for the second growth curve, an important change is the transformation of capital power into scientific and technological power, or capital power must be plugged into the wings of cognition in order to fly further.

Environmental protection companies are seeking change, but the way to play is single.

First, the space is cramped, one of the key factors is that there are not many cards in hand, especially the technical background of the cards is extremely scarce.

3. Long-termism is the key to layout

Judging from the situation brought to environmental protection enterprises by this wave of new energy boom, pre-layout and long-term deep cultivation are the key to grasping the opportunities in the industry.

The boundaries of environmental protection are being broken from both internal and external directions, and the players involved in this field have changed dramatically, and the new opportunities for environmental protection in the future no longer belong to a small number of business groups. Without a deep and long-term layout, the competitiveness of new opportunities will be weakened.

Entering the second half of transformative development, the difficulty of industry competition will escalate rapidly, and the key to strategic layout will partly change from grabbing the market to grabbing time.

Because the future layout can only be early enough and long enough to finally form an offensive and create a stable growth pole.

For example, BYD has insisted on using lithium iron phosphate batteries since 2005, and it has gone a long way to form today's advantageous situation.

4. Transition from opportunistic players to professional players

If the premise of the sustainable development of the domestic environmental protection industry is established, then there will be world-class enterprises in the future.

In this process, some companies have to complete the transition from opportunistic players to professional players, while others face elimination.

The first half of the environmental protection industry has come to an end, and after entering a new stage, key competitive advantages and differentiated competitive strategies have become particularly important.

A new chapter will finally begin in the cold winter

When the tuyere comes, some enterprises will be blown up, but in the end, whether they can resist the wind depends on whether they have very deep underlying capabilities. Each company's capability model is different, and the direction of breaking the game is also different.

The real driving force of the environmental protection industry comes from economic development, including industrial transformation and change, and the current economy as a whole has gone through the dividend period, and the big opportunity will basically not appear again.

The breakthrough of the industry will change from waiting for opportunities to creating opportunities, and a new chapter will eventually open from the cold winter. Times have changed, abandon illusions and prepare for battle.

* Castle Peak Industry Review **

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