Environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry makes efforts to make up for shortcomings.
Our reporter Gu Yang
The real application of technology industry is "grown" in the soil of the market.
This is especially true for the environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry.
Recently, the "Action Plan for High-Quality Development of Environmental Protection Equipment Manufacturing Industry (2022-2025)" was officially released. After the "Guiding Opinions", my country's third special document on the development of the environmental protection equipment industry.
What is the development status of my country's environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry?
In what aspects should the high-quality development of the industry be developed in the future?
The Economic Daily reporter interviewed industry experts.
Industrialization gap to be bridged
GWI, an international environmental protection platform and an authoritative business intelligence provider in the global water industry, has released the latest "Global TOP50 Water Company" ranking list. There are many industry giants such as France's Veolia, Ecolab, and Denmark's Grundfos. Chinese companies such as Beijing Enterprises Water, Capital Group, and Clear Water are at the top of the list by virtue of their comprehensive strength.
Although the ranking of Clearwater has jumped 14 places in the past five years, this achievement does not seem to make Wen Jianping, Chairman of Clearwater, happy: Although domestic environmental protection equipment has made breakthroughs in many key areas in recent years, the technical level has been significantly improved, and the core Technical equipment has won international and domestic technology awards many times, but an embarrassing reality is that domestic equipment is still difficult to obtain brand recognition from users, especially the high-end environmental protection equipment market, which is basically still occupied by foreign brands.
"Taking the water treatment industry as an example, the current situation is that the domestic chip manufacturing industry, the steel industry, the power industry, the salt lake lithium extraction industry, and more than 90% of the seawater desalination industry enterprises use foreign brand membrane equipment for industrial water treatment. Deal with it." Wen Jianping said, this is not because the quality of our own brand products can not keep up, in fact, many key technical indicators have surpassed foreign counterparts, unfortunately, there is still an industrialization gap in market application.
The "industrialization gap" mentioned by Wen Jianping refers to the disconnection between the industrial R&D and industrial application of my country's environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry. Many technological invention patents cannot be industrialized and promoted, and the degree of industrialization of the industry is not high.
Fu Tao, Dean of the E20 Research Institute and Director of the Industry-University-Research Center of the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Peking University, analyzed this and believed that scientific research institutes and design institutes are making technological breakthroughs and engineering, while water companies and capital are making commercialization, large-scale, Branding, while in the middle of industrialization, there is almost no main body to do it, which leads to the phenomenon of disconnection.
Industry experts pointed out that at present, my country's water treatment industry is still in the early stage of industrialization. Engineering construction is dominated, technical configuration is bulk, and operation management relies more on experience, which objectively brings obstacles to the market application of domestic independent research and development of environmental protection equipment.
In fact, the environmental protection equipment industry in other fields is facing a similar dilemma, and it is urgent to speed up the problem in the market consensus.
Three "misfits" to overcome
The environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry is an important part of the green environmental protection industry and a basic industry that supports the construction of ecological civilization and green development.
After more than 40 years of development, the environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry has gone through a arduous journey from scratch and from small to large.
Wang Yining, member of the National Strategic Emerging Industry Expert Advisory Committee and honorary president of the China Environmental Protection Machinery Industry Association, said that during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, the total output value of the environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry will increase by an average of 9.4% annually, and will reach 950 billion yuan in 2021. There are more than 10,000 enterprises engaged in environmental protection equipment manufacturing. Compared with the end of the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan", the annual output value of the industry has increased by 56.6%, the number of enterprises has increased by 42.8%, and the profit margin has also been greatly improved. In 169 sub-sectors of the machinery industry ranked 13th.
However, the problem of insufficient innovation in the environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry is still relatively prominent.
Wen Jianping said that some high-end products still have obvious shortcomings of "stuck neck", and the comprehensive level of industry intelligence and digitalization needs to be further improved, especially in the disadvantaged position in international competition. In the past few years, the phenomenon of 'emphasizing engineering and ignoring technology' prevailed, the driving force of technological innovation in the industry was insufficient, and the investment in continuous technology research and development was not high."
At the same time, enterprises are "big but not strong, small but not specialized", the structural shortcomings of products are increasingly emerging, and the development of the industry is unbalanced and insufficient.
In Wang Yining's view, at present, there are three main "inadequates" in the environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry: First, the supply capacity of key technical equipment is not suitable for the needs of major environmental governance; second, the rapidly expanding industrial scale does not meet the requirements of sustainable and healthy development The third is that the level of development does not meet the requirements of the future pillar industries of the national economy.
According to reports, for a long period of time, the development of domestic technical equipment has mainly revolved around practical fields that are urgently needed in the market and have large profit potential.
However, with the improvement of my country's environmental protection standards and the complexity of environmental pollution application scenarios, coupled with foreign technology blockades, the path of introduction, digestion, absorption and re-innovation is basically impossible.
"The "Action Plan" focuses on the new needs for the environmental protection equipment industry under the new situation and the shortcomings of the industry's own development, and formulates a column for key areas of core technology and equipment, focusing on the new needs of environmental governance during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. The synergy of pollution reduction and carbon reduction has pointed out the direction for the development of the industry." Wang Yining said.
Create a whole-process innovation ecological chain
According to the "Action Plan", the output value of my country's environmental protection equipment industry will reach 1.3 trillion yuan by 2025.
Wang Yining pointed out that domestic environmental protection equipment has basically met domestic demand, and the product price has obvious competitive advantages compared with similar foreign products.
In the next step, the development of environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry should pay more attention to the quality of industry growth.
At the recently held "Implementing the Spirit of the National Two Sessions and China's Eco-Environmental Industry's 'Learning, Innovation, and Development' Discussion and Mobilization Meeting", Guo Chengzhan, Secretary of the Party Committee and President of the China Environmental Protection Industry Association, said that it is necessary to innovate the development ideas of the ecological and environmental protection industry. , institutional mechanisms, technical equipment, service models and spiritual culture, and promote the high-tech, compound, integrated and high-quality development of the ecological and environmental protection industry.
"It is estimated that by 2025, the sewage treatment industry will reach a scale of 10 billion yuan. This raises a new topic: in the future, how to transform scientific and technological achievements into real productivity is a key part of the industry's innovation and development." Wen Jianping said, Environmental protection equipment is the core of the environmental protection industry. In the green transformation process of the environmental protection industry, the core is to develop the environmental protection equipment industry with high quality. Enterprises can insist on research and transformation to create the whole process of "original research + technical research + industrialization of achievements" Innovation ecological chain.
In this regard, the "Action Plan" proposes that it is necessary to formulate key tasks in four aspects: technological innovation, product supply, industrial structure, and development mode in combination with the development of technical equipment in various sub-sectors of the environmental protection equipment manufacturing industry and the characteristics of my country's pollutant control. The action of "making up for shortcomings" to improve innovation ability, the action of "forging long plates" to enhance product supply capacity, the action of "gathering advantages" in industrial structure adjustment, and the action of "accumulating the potential" in transformation of development model.
"Faced with opportunities and challenges, our ecological environment people have great achievements." Cheng Hanfei, deputy director of the Urban Sewage Treatment Branch of China Environmental Protection Industry Association and chief engineer of MCC Ecological Environmental Protection Group, suggested that an industry cooperation platform should be built with the thinking of industrial Internet to realize the elements Resource aggregation, collaborative innovation, enhancing the resilience of the industrial chain and supply chain, jointly creating and sharing value, and truly transforming industry talent resources and technological advantages into industrial advantages and economic advantages in global competition.
Gu Yang