Caijing Magazine 2017-07-27

“Looking back to the past 5 years of the Chinese water affair market, BEWG, as the leading enterprise in the water affairs fields, wrote magnificent chapters in the history of the Chinese water affairs and gradually developed into a whole-industry-chain comprehensive water environment service provider, covering industrial investment, planning and design, building and reconstruction and operation service. And it involves many fields such as the urban water service, water environment comprehensive treatment, seawater desalination, industrial sewage treatment, membrane treatment, overseas water affairs business and environmental technology.”

Five years ago, BEWG’s water treatment scale was less than 1 million tons/day, its operation revenue less than HK 400 million dollar, the net profit less than HK 50 million dollar, the total asset less than HK 5 billion dollar and its market value less than HK 2.2 billion dollar; while five years later, its water treatment scale exceeds 20 million tons/day, its operation revenue approximates HK 6.5 billion dollar, the net profit exceeds HK 1.1 billion dollar, the total asset reaches HK 45 billion dollar and its market value exceeds HK 50 billion dollar. 

For five years from Beijing Enterprises Water Group Limited (“BEWG”) reorganization for listing in 2008, its water treatment scale increased by 19 times, operation revenue by 18times, net profit by 26 times, total asset by 8 times and the market value by 22 times.   

BEWG has been staying on the first position in the Top 10 Influential Chinese Enterprises in the Water Affairs Field for successive 4 years depending on its outstanding achievement and was awarded as one of the four best water affairs companies around the world in the Global Water Affairs Summit Forum held in April 2014 in Paris, becoming the only Chinese water company winning this award.

BEWG is the flagship enterprise of Beijing Enterprises Group Company Limited and an enterprise listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and was selected as a constituent stock of HS China (HK-listed) 100 Index and HS Composite MidCap Index. And it involves many fields such as the urban water service (including raw water, water diversion, water supply, sewage and recycled water), water environment comprehensive treatment, seawater desalination, industrial sewage treatment, membrane treatment, overseas water affairs business and environmental technology service and covers the whole industry chain, including industrial investment, planning and design, building and reconstruction and operation service. Till now, BEWG have invested over 300 projects in more than 20 provinces, cities and autonomous regions in China and Taiwan and invested and operated over 30 overseas water projects, spread over Portugal, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

As a typical example of a modern state-owned enterprise and a new state-owned enterprise, BEWG has been developing at top speed and its motive force and supporting factors lie in “3 new mechanisms”, “3 kinds of hard power” and “3soft resources”.  

3 new mechanisms: governing structure, decision-making mechanism and incentive policies 

The corporate governance structure of the mixed ownership allow BEWG to have a gene mingling features of the state-owned, private and foreign enterprises and embodies styles of the state-owned enterprise’s honesty and abidance by rules, the private enterprise’s flexibility and aggressiveness and the foreign enterprise’s profession and pragmatism.  

The decision-making mechanism of independent management and high efficiency and agility allows BEWG’s management team to be more concentrated and effective. The decision making in four aspects (operating decision, investment decision, technological decision and financial decision) is clear in positioning and simple in procedures and highlights the professional control degree.

In addition to soft arrangement including vocational development planning and the succession planning, the incentive policies also include such achievements rewards as bonus, award and option, to further motivate initiative and creativity of the organization and increase the sense of belonging and pride of teams.   

3 kinds of hard power: business system, capital channel and technology platform

BEWG formed a professional business system based on the “2+5 businesses” (i.e. two main businesses and 5 key businesses), which covers the whole procedure of investment, technology, construction and operation and mainly includes the client-oriented and quick response mechanism, management procedure and work standards, risk prevention and control and financial security. The business system allows BEWG to have the core competitiveness.  
BEWG possesses strong investing and financing capability and smooth capital channels including Hong Kong capital market, domestic and foreign financial institution channel and Singapore international financing platform. Its capital ability can be measured from six aspects: multiple financing channels, good sustainability, large new scale, low composite cost, long financing term and convenient application.  

BEWG has established several centers and bases at the ministerial level, including the technological center, the research and development center, Beijing Enterprises Group-Tsinghua Environment Research Institute, Beihua Qingchuang Company and Nanjing Municipal Design Institute and possesses dozens of patented technologies and proprietary technologies with proprietary intellectual property rights and several collaborative technologies.

3 soft resources: development strategy, enterprise culture and professional team

At the beginning of 2014, BEWG employed a internationally known professional agency to carry out the strategic management consulting and culture construction consulting. The new strategic planning established the strategic positioning of “a leading professional water environment comprehensive service provider”, defined a path of  sustainable and high-speed development with the urban water services and the water environment comprehensive treatment as the two main businesses and the seawater desalination, industrial sewage treatment, membrane treatment, overseas water affairs business and environmental technology service.   

As for the corporate culture construction, BEWG dug the corporate culture features, deduced the culture inheritance, analyzed the culture status quo, compacted the key corporate culture factors and built the core cultural values with three virtues (responsibility, worthiness and sharing) by sticking to the development views of reassuring the authorities, satisfying citizens, benefitting the enterprise and staff and achieving win-win.   

Professional teams are BEWG’s key resource. It developed 10 professional teams in the aspects of management, technology, scientific research, investment, construction, operation, finance, risk management, human resource and information, and formed a human resource architecture pattern with high-quality staff as the basis, professional talents as the backbone and the state-of-the-art figures as the pilot.   

Such a “three-three-three impetus pattern” not only promoted BEWG’s rapid development in the past five years and will maintain the development momentum in the future five years. It is expected that by the end of 2018, BEWG will realize the development goals of over HK 18 billion dollar of operation revenue, more than 800 water plants, daily treatment scale of the water services of 40 million tons and approximate HK 800 billion dollar of market value.

Each age bring forth new genius on this noble land, each will rule its own domain for years to come. BEWG will actively create new value for clients and the society on missions to “protect the source of life and create green environment” and the vision of “evergreen water and everlasting businesses”, by taking favorable opportunities of the urbanization and industrialization in China.