Environmental instrument manufacturers eat billions of cakes

The construction of an ecological civilization has become a consensus in China, which will bring great opportunities for environmental services such as PM2.5 monitoring. Aiming at the ready market for environmental monitoring equipment, Chinese and foreign manufacturers have launched fierce competition.

Thermo Fisher, the world's largest scientific instrument company, announced on the 16th that a new plant in Suzhou, with a total investment of US$20 million, was officially launched, which is the company’s fifth factory in China. Mark Gasper, President of Thermo Fisher Scientific, told the reporter: “In recent years, Thermo Fisher's China business has maintained a growth rate of more than 25%, and its current sales revenue has reached US$700 million. In the next five years, we Plan to double income again."

According to the latest data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in the first three quarters of this year, the environmental protection equipment industry including environmental monitoring equipment achieved industrial output value of 136.8 billion yuan, an increase of 19% over the same period of last year. The newly added fixed asset investment was 25.2 billion yuan, an increase of 153% over the same period of last year. Compared with the overall downturn in the equipment manufacturing industry, environmental protection equipment shows a higher degree of prosperity.

The government’s attention has brought opportunities to the environmental instrument market. Take atmospheric monitoring as an example. In September of this year, the Beijing environmental protection department announced the addition of eight PM2.5 monitoring sites, bringing the total number of sites to 35 and starting to publish test data. In early November, China's first atmospheric super pollution monitoring station was unveiled in Guangdong, with a total investment of over 75 million yuan. On November 16, the air quality index was released at the pilot sites in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. The new index will cover pollutants such as PM2.5.

Domestic environmental instrument manufacturers have begun to taste the sweetness. GEM companies' environmental protection pioneers announced in August and November this year that they had won the bid for air quality monitoring services in Shandong Province and Hebei Province respectively, with a total amount of nearly RMB 100 million. In the secondary market, encouraged by the concepts of “ecological civilization construction” and “beautiful China”, the environmental protection stock price of Xianhe has soared by more than 5%. Pioneer environmental protection official said: "In the future, the company's products will sink, from the provincial project to the city and county markets."

In the ascendant market of environmental instruments, the competition between Chinese and foreign manufacturers is also heating up. The China Environmental Monitoring Center recently announced the first batch of companies that have inspected the PM2.5 continuous automatic monitoring system, including Ten Environmental Protection, Thermo Fisher and other 10 companies. Insiders pointed out that compared with foreign-invested equipment, domestically-made monitoring equipment is relatively cheap, only about half of the latter. However, there is a lack of stability, so the market is dominated by foreign products.

According to the plan, by 2015 China's PM2.5 monitoring will cover all prefecture-level cities, and only the initial investment in equipment will exceed 2 billion yuan. In addition to PM2.5, China’s control over the total amount of pollutants discharged has become increasingly stringent. This will lead to considerable demand for on-line monitoring equipment for industrial pollution sources. The above markets together add up to more than 10 billion yuan.

It is worth noting that since China has carried out environmental monitoring for a relatively short period of time, many standards and norms are formulated with reference to foreign documents, but some standards and specifications do not conform to China's national conditions. To this end, the Ministry of Environmental Protection announced at the end of October the technical requirements and test methods for the PM10 and PM2.5 continuous monitoring systems (for trial implementation). With the establishment of domestic standards, the environmental monitoring market will be standardized, leading enterprises will gain considerable room for development.