【英语中国】中国低碳指数亮相 意在吸引风投

Silicon Valley venture-capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners sifted through about 2,500 Chinese companies in everything from nuclear power to batteries to create an index of publicly traded Chinese companies in the low-carbon sector to raise the profile of the burgeoning segment.

VantagePoint, which is a major shareholder in electric-vehicle maker Tesla Motors Inc., among other alternative-energy and technology start-ups, started the 35-company China Low Carbon Index Saturday.

Its partner, China Beijing Environmental Exchange, a city-government-backed financial institution seeking to become a trading platform for environmental equities, will publish the index on its web site, VantagePoint said. Depending on how much attention the index gets, it could help the companies attract investors, though it's unclear what the interest will be.

VantagePoint managing director Melissa Guzy said the index was created to fill a gap because Western investors tend to overlook China's green companies. Existing green indexes skew heavily in favor of U.S. or European companies, even though last year nearly half of the initial public offerings in alternative energy were Chinese, and they accounted for 75% of IPO proceeds, she said.

That low profile means Chinese alternative-energy companies are missing out on capital from institutional investors, such as pension funds, that often invest in an index of companies as a way to get exposure to a sector, she said.

And despite increasing media attention on Chinese companies like solar-power leaders Suntec Power Holdings Co., or Yingli Green Energy Holding Co., China lags far behind the U.S. in terms of private investment in start-ups. Last year, venture-capital firms invested $3.5 billion in U.S. alternative-energy companies, while they invested only $330 million in Chinese companies, Ms. Guzy said.

'People think that clean tech in China is crowded, but it's not,' she said.

VantagePoint's criteria for selecting companies for the low-carbon index included a requirement that at least 50% or 3.5 billion yuan ($512 million) of annual revenue come from low-carbon business, that the company has good liquidity, transparency and a three-month average market capitalization of at least $250 million. Of the companies, about one-quarter are in wind, and one-quarter in solar. The remainder is split between nuclear, hydropower, batteries, energy efficiency, smart-grid, clean-coal and water-treatment companies.

More than half of the companies are listed on China's mainland stock exchanges, with the rest roughly evenly split between the U.S. and Hong Kong.

Ms. Guzy said sectors worth watching in China include firms working on building utility-scale batteries that could be used to store electricity generated from weather-dependent sources like wind or solar farms. Electric utilities around the world need a way to store power when conditions are good so they can dispatch it later when demand is high.

'We're looking for bottlenecks that young companies can solve,' Ms. Guzy said.

硅谷风险投资公司VantagePoint Venture Partners对大约2,500家中国公司进行了筛选，从核能到电池，涉及方方面面，来给低碳行业的中国上市公司编制一项指数，以提高这个新兴行业的知名度。

VantagePoint是美国电动汽车生产商Tesla Motors Inc.和其他一些替代能源与高科技初创企业的大股东。上周六，这家公司推出了涵盖35家公司的“中国低碳指数”(China Low Carbon Index)。

European Pressphoto Agency尘土弥漫的天空笼罩着北京川流不息的车流。其合作伙伴为北京环境交易所，这是一家由市政府支持的金融机构，正寻求成为一个环境股交易平台。VantagePoint说，北京环境交易所将在网站上发布这一指数。指数有望帮助各成分公司吸引投资，具体就看指数能够吸引多大程度的关注，但还不知道风投界会有多大的兴趣。

VantagePoint董事总经理顾怡梅 (Melissa Guzy)说，创建这项指数是为了填补一个空白，因为西方投资者往往忽略了中国的绿色企业。她说，现有的绿色指数严重地偏向于美国和欧洲的企业，但去年替代能源行业的首次公开募股(IPO)活动中，中国公司占了总宗数的接近一半，占总收入的75%。

顾怡梅说，由于不受关注，中国替代能源企业不断与养老基金等机构投资者的投资失之交臂，而这些投资者常常是通过指数化投资来获得对某个行业的敞口的。

另外，虽然媒体对太阳能领袖企业尚德电力(Suntec Power Holdings Co.)或英利绿色能源控股有限公司(Yingli Green Energy Holding Co.)等中国公司的关注越来越多，但在初创企业获得私人投资方面，中国仍远远落后于美国。顾怡梅说，去年风投界在美国替代能源行业一共投资了35亿美元，而对中国公司的投资仅为3.3亿美元。

她说，人们以为中国清洁科技行业已经过剩，但不是这样的。

VantagePoint为中国低碳指数选择成分公司的标准包括，公司的年收入中至少有50%或人民币35亿元（合5.12亿美元）来自低碳业务，要有良好的流动性、透明度，三个月平均市值不低于2.5亿美元。这些公司中约四分之一来自风电行业，另四分之一来自太阳能行业。其余则分别是核能、水电、电池、能效、智能电网、清洁煤和水处理公司。

半数以上的成分公司都在中国大陆的交易所上市，剩下的大约一半在美国上市，一半在香港上市。

顾怡梅说，那些正在研究如何组建大规模储能电池，用于储存风电场、太阳能电场等天气依赖型来源所发电能的公司，是中国值得关注的行业之一。世界各地的电力公司都需要采用某种方式，在条件好的时候储存电能，等到需求很高时再把这些电能输送出去。

顾怡梅说，我们在寻找，看哪些瓶颈是年轻公司可以解决的。