China Environmental:Key takeaway from biomass industry specialist call

We invited Kaidi Ecological (China’s largest biomass treatment company) to talkabout updates and outlook on China's biomass treatment market. We summarizethe key takeaways below.

    Our sector top pick remains China Everbright Intl (257 HK), which we like forimproving earnings quality and improving free cashflow profile. For more details,please refer to China Environmental: Stronger enforcement, improving cashflow;raising CEI EPS, Target Price, 13 November 2017.

    Policy updates.

    China is vigorously promoting biomass heat/power cogeneration projects, whilenot strongly encouraging power-only projects. Government targets to increasecogeneration capacity significantly in Northern China, yet has no such plan inSouthern China. China has recently scrapped regulations that require 1) there canbe only one biomass treatment project in one county or within a radius of 100km; 2) capacity for biomass power projects cannot exceed 30MW. Kaidi believesthat China’s target to have 13.12GW of biomass capacity installed by 2020 isachievable, if we also include the equivalent power generation capacity fromcogeneration projects.

    Raw material cost.

    The company was able to maintain biomass raw material cost stable in the past10 years, through long-term materials supply contracts, logistics management,intermediary layers elimination, and automated operation.

    Operations.

    Burning forestry residuals and wooden wastes is generally more profitable thanburning straws currently. However, most biomass plants still burn a mix ofdifferent raw materials, as it is hardly feasible to burn only one kind of rawmaterial. The profitability of biomass power plant differs from one county toanother, and there is no general rule on project profitability comparison forNorthern China versus Southern China. Most projects of Kaidi have exclusiverights to operate within a county.