In 2020, the trillion market for seawater desalination seems to be taking off.

Has sea water desalination entered the critical point of commercialization?

‘Compared with the previous two years, the utilization of seawater resources has improved, and many water treatment enterprises and capital have begun to know what desalination is and what its value is. However, there are also some problems such as high desalination cost, insufficient supply-demand response and lack of core technologies, and these difficulties will still exist in the following years.’

One industry veteran admits that the seawater desalination is still in early stages and will take five to eight years to mature.

One reason of the push is some domestic brokerages have even predicted that desalination will generate more than 1 trillion yuan of industrial benefits in China by 2020.

The biggest traditional environmental protection sectors affected by seawater desalination are sewage treatment, water treatment equipment, membrane treatment equipment and reverse osmosis technology application. In terms of ecological benefits, seawater desalination can improve the success rate of water resources utilization, provide water ecological environment quality with open source, cost-saving, low-carbon cycle and other applications, and it is expected that seawater desalination can bring expected cost reduction value to the industry.

Simply, the types of companies involved in seawater desalination have traditional integrated water treatment service providers, IT giants and some innovative enterprises, all of them need to give consideration to both professionalism and technology. However, there seems to be no mature and stable track for the macro-economic benefits to be shared by companies in the industry, resource-based platforms and cross-border capital.

A number of industry insiders said that although the market is booming due to various horse RACES, it is still too early to commercialize the operation of seawater desalination, and there are very few models that can run through the closed loop of commerce.

Even in the case of desalination, which players are pilling into, there was a consensus that desalination was still not on the right track, and there were many questions about who would pay for it.

On the other hand, ‘seawater desalination is to expand access to water resources and save resources.’ The biggest problem in the industrial chain this year is that the core technology resources are not enough or distributed unevenly, we should be use seawater desalination innovation to provide more fresh water resources, instead of focusing on the more mature and busy areas of technology.

To solve these problems, companies in the market are looking for different ways to cooperate with each other.

Any market will cover four elements: demand side, supply side, value unit and matching mechanism. As far as seawater desalination is concerned, a sound business model requires the demanders to exist objectively, the key for suppliers is that seawater desalination service providers should not only have a single product, but also have a whole set of solutions.

The value unit is that the service is subject to the current desalination rules. Finally, the matching mechanism, how to build a business closed loop, but this process is very complicated.

Under the pressure of investment and market, more cross-border capital chooses to operate in a more complex and diversified mode, and the industrial development is still at a very early stage. At present, most of the commercialized applications are based on technology and excellent products.

Traditional water treatment enterprises, such as Safbon water, TRCE, Originwater, invest in seawater desalination, their advantages come from the continuous comprehensive benefits generated by their core technology, and most of them are concentrated in membrane treatment equipment manufacturing, with the addition of purification technology and solustions, the added value of equipment can be improved and a larger market cn be obtained.

From the perspective of the basic, technical and application layers of the industrial chain, it is generally believed in the industry that due to the high barriers of water resource recycling and water purification technology, long-term high investment is often required for high returns. Therefore, established players tend to lay out at the bottom level.

Another direction is to find more opportunities in subdivisions. Industry analysis generally points out that desalination equipment, such as seawater desalination equipment, can only rely on sinking or huge financing. The track has promising prospects, but competition is gradually intensifying.

However, on the other side of the coin, such as reverse osmosis technology application, membrane treatment equipment still has a great opportunity, the excavable value is greater, combined with seawater desalination, sewage treatment samples and technical barriers will be higher than the former.