Based on approximately 2500 Chinese companies covering all aspects from nuclear energy to the battery, VantagePoint Venture Partners introduces an index for Chinese listed companies of low-carbon industries so as to promote the reputation of this new industry.

VantagePoint is the major shareholder of U.S. electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors Inc. and some other start-ups in alternative energy and high-tech. Last Saturday, VantagePoint introduced China Low Carbon Index covering 35 companies.

Dust-filled sky enshrouds the traffic stream of Beijing. Its partner-Beijing Environment Exchange, a financial organization supported by municipal government, is seeking to be a platform for environmental stock exchange. VantagePoint said, Beijing Environment Exchange will publish this index on its website. The index is expected to help attract investment into component companies, which depends on how much concern the index can attract. But it is still unknown how much interest of the risk investors in this regard.

VantagePoint managing director Melissa Guzy said the index is created to fill a gap, because Western investors tend to overlook China's green enterprise. She said, the existing green index severely biased in favor of U.S. and European companies, but in last year's initial public offering (IPO) activities of alternative energy industry, Chinese companies accounted for nearly half the total number of cases, 75 % of the total income.

Ms.Guzy said, due to the lack of concern, China’s alternative energy enterprises often missed the investment from pension funds and other institutional investors, while these investors always open the gate into certain industries through index investment.

In addition, although the media pay more and more attention to Chinese companies such as solar energy leader Suntec Power Holdings Co. or Yingli Green Energy Holding Co., China still lags far behind U.S.A in terms of the start-ups obtaining private investment. Ms.Guzy said, last year the risk investment in U.S alternative energy industries added up to 3.5 billion dollars while only 0.33 billion dollars in Chinese companies.

She said it is believed that China has excessive clean tech industry, which is not the case.

VantagePoint adopted the following standards to select component companies for China low-carbon index: at least 50% or 3.5 billion yuan (about 512 million U.S. dollars) of the company's annual revenue from the low-carbon business, good liquidity and transparency, three-month average market capitalization not less than 250 million U.S. dollars. About one quarter of these companies come from the wind power industry, and another quarter from the solar industry. The rest are nuclear energy, hydropower, batteries, energy efficiency, smart grid, clean coal and water treatment companies.

More than half component companies listed on stock exchanges in mainland China, while one quarter in the United States and the rest quarter in Hong Kong.

Those who are studying on how to build large-scale energy storage batteries to store wind power, solar electric and other weather-dependent-source power generated companies are among the industries of concerns. Power companies across the world need to adopt a certain way to save energy when the conditions are good, so as to make power distribution when having high demand, said Ms. Guzy.
We are looking for the bottleneck to be solved by these young companies, said Ms. Guzy.

The news release is at: http://www.chinalowcarbonindex.org/faqe.asp?id=33&f1=14&f2=1