Three changes of environmental protection industry in China in the past three months in 2023

Unexpectedly, the COVID-19 epidemic, which lasted for three years, unexpectedly became the watershed of the environmental protection industry.

Although more than three months have just passed in 2023, it gives people the feeling that major events are constantly happening.

At the end of January and the beginning of February, a number of environmental protection listed companies disclosed the 2022 performance forecast. It was found that the environmental protection industry experienced the "worst year in history" in 2022, and about 70% of enterprises experienced a decline in net profit to varying degrees.

In late February, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment held an annual national conference on ecological environmental protection, which put forward the requirement of "comprehensively rectifying third-party environmental protection service organizations" for the first time, and the problem of fraud of third-party environmental protection service organizations was put on the table for the first time.

At the same time, the state-owned power of environmental protection industry is also infiltrating more and more widely. After provincial environmental protection groups and municipal environmental protection groups, county and district levels have also begun to set up their own local state-owned environmental protection groups.

In a word, the environmental protection industry is undergoing tremendous changes, whether on the demand side (the market of environmental protection engineering construction is slowing down), the supply side (state-owned assets replace private capital as the leading factor) or the regulatory side (the competent authorities strengthen supervision), which is different from the routine we have been familiar with in the past ten or twenty years. Under multiple forces, the whole industry is about to undergo profound turmoil and reshuffle, which may be an opportunity for some enterprises and a nightmare for others.

However, in general, the environmental protection industry will develop in an increasingly benign and healthy direction. The era of "fighting for capital" is over, and the era of "fighting for technology" is coming. For those small environmental protection enterprises with technology and solutions, their spring is coming soon.