·Strictly speaking, there is no typical commercial meteorological company in China at present. The so-called commercial meteorological enterprise is in a parasitic state, which is just a commercial extension of the public welfare meteorological undertaking. Judging from the public information on financial funds of the China Meteorological Administration, the scale of natural resources, marine meteorology and other expenditures in recent years is about 22 billion yuan, of which about 6 billion is used for other meteorological affairs expenditures, which basically determines the scale of China's commercial meteorology. Of which, about two-thirds of the meteorological business is undertaken by the derivative enterprises of the relevant subordinate units, and the formal commercial meteorological output value scale does not exceed 2 billion.
With the increase in the frequency of extreme weather around the world, meteorological issues have gradually moved from a marginal subject to a central position, attracting much attention. On April 28, 2022, the State Council issued the "Outline for High-Quality Development of Meteorology (2022-2035)" (Guo Fa [2022] No. 11), which once again ignited the market's enthusiasm for commercial meteorology. The development of China's commercial meteorology cannot avoid the following problems.
(1) The market positioning of China's commercial meteorology. In many reports on commercial weather, the commercial application of weather information is often placed in a prominent position, especially the application of weather disaster prevention. Positioning the primary market for commercial meteorology as meteorological disaster prevention is actually an illusion. On the one hand, affected by the inertia of meteorological public welfare thinking, disaster mitigation and prevention will intuitively be placed first in the development of commercial meteorology; on the other hand, considering the object of loss, meteorological defense will be mistaken for rigid demand. Actually this is wrong.
There are roughly two objects of work in the meteorological business, one is the prevention of meteorological disasters, and the other is the development and utilization of meteorological resources. For meteorological disaster defense, it can be divided into permanent defense and temporary defense. Improving the rainproof, windproof, and lightning protection grades of building design belongs to permanent defense, while temporary reinforcement during flood season belongs to temporary defense. With the continuous advancement of technology, the level of permanent defense is also getting higher and higher, and the demand for meteorological disaster defense is actually shrinking. In fact, the market capacity of defensive business weather is much smaller than imagined. In reality, we have to consider not only the physical effects of weather, but also the economic effects of weather. The physical impact of meteorology on agriculture is great, but the economic impact is not large, and it is enough to have public weather services. At the same time, there is also a hidden permanent defense level improvement in agriculture, such as improved wheat varieties to improve lodging resistance, which further compresses the actual demand for commercial weather in agriculture.
In other industries, industries with low impact and high defense, such as high-rise buildings, large facilities, special equipment, etc., do not actually need special meteorological information (except for extreme weather), and the historical meteorological data is used at one time in the design to prepare the defense level. enough. In industries with high impact and high defense, such as nuclear power plants, hazardous chemical production workshops, various warehouses, etc., meteorological information is often difficult to play a role, because their defense level has basically ruled out the impact of weather. The low-impact and low-defense situation is the focus of non-profit meteorological services, including people's travel, family life, and general production activities. The current weather forecast can fully satisfy them. In defensive commercial weather, only in industries with high impact and low defense , there is a real demand for commercial weather, which is the primary and clear issue for the development of China's commercial weather.
At the same time, considering China's large investment in non-profit meteorology, it will continue to meet the needs of defensive meteorology, which will further reduce the market space for defensive commercial meteorology. Therefore, the strategic positioning of China's commercial meteorological development should focus on the development and utilization of meteorological resources, rather than intuitive meteorological disaster prevention.
(2) The primary task of China's commercial meteorological development is price discovery. The essence of commercial meteorology is to use market means to meet meteorological needs, which is inseparable from the comparison of price and cost. The market first meets the needs of those customers who can afford the price, which is the first principle of the market economy. Only in this way can producers receive sufficient funds to provide better products, continuously improve technology and reduce costs. As production costs fall, producers can continue to meet the demands of customers who cannot afford high prices. From the perspective of the product life cycle, there are few customers who can afford high prices, and the vast majority of consumers can only accept a relatively low price. However, without those few high-priced customers, the cost of production will not be reduced, and ultimately, the needs of more low-priced consumers will not be met. There is a similar pattern in the market development of commercial weather. In the initial stage, the first task of commercial weather is to find customers who can pay high prices for specialized production, rather than mass production for more low-priced consumers. In most public welfare industries, the development of its commercial part has to go through such a process of price discovery, and the meteorological industry is no exception. China's commercial meteorology is still in its infancy, and improving the efficiency of price discovery is an important means to promote its rapid development.
(3) The product form of China's commercial meteorology. Forecast and live data are the main product forms of current commercial weather. On the one hand, they are influenced by traditional weather service models, and on the other hand, they are related to the market positioning of commercial weather. This situation has been deviated from the right track in a sense. Commercial weather should not be a porter of weather data, but a doctor, a cook, and a traffic policeman. Weather data is just the raw material for commercial weather, not what it ends up being. With the continuous advancement of information technology, some pseudo-commercial meteorological products have begun to wear the cloak of the digital economy, but in this way of changing the soup without changing the medicine, what consumers finally get is real-time data or forecast data, which is of practical help to them. Not big. In recent years, local meteorological departments and their affiliated units have made great efforts to improve the level of meteorological services and put forward the concept of refined services. But the real implementation work is still to distribute more and more detailed forecast data and real-time data. This is not a real refined service, and it is not what commercial weather should look like. The real demand of commercial meteorology is not simply the acquisition of meteorological data, but how to improve the efficiency of the use of meteorological data. The product form of China's commercial meteorology should be a data management system, a command system, and a decision-making system, rather than simply data display and data aggregation. The same is true in reality. A really good commercial meteorological product must be a data management product integrated into the industry, a product that helps solve meteorological problems, rather than a product that simply informs meteorological information. At the same time, the product design and development embedded in the industry is also complementary to price discovery. Good development is more conducive to price discovery, and good price is also conducive to better development. It is also a top priority to change the existing form of China's commercial meteorological products.
(4) There is a relative shortage of talents in commercial meteorology in China. From the technical level, meteorology is a typical high-tech industry, and talents are the key. However, the shortage of China's commercial meteorological talents is a fact. On the one hand, the development of China's non-profit meteorological undertakings has absorbed a large number of meteorological talents into the state-owned system. At present, the China Meteorological Administration system and its affiliated institutions have a total of more than 100,000 employees, including more than 60,000 active employees and more than 40,000 retirees, a huge number. On the other hand, the total number of meteorological talents trained in China is not large. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology has undertaken most of the training tasks for meteorological talents. There are more than 70,000 people in lightning protection, etc., and there are less than 20,000 meteorological science and technology talents in the strict sense. That is to say, if meteorological science and technology talents are willing to enter the national meteorological system, they are almost completely absorbed. Even if some do not enter the meteorological system, they may no longer work in meteorology. Although this situation has changed in recent years, the shortage of commercial meteorological talents in China, especially the shortage of high-level meteorological science and technology talents, is inevitable. In the short term, an effective way to solve the shortage of commercial meteorological talents in China is to improve the quality and efficiency of the existing meteorological system, and separate some meteorological professionals to engage in commercial meteorology. The institutional reform of the China Meteorological Administration, which has been brewing several times, should also pay attention to this issue.
(5) The parasitic state of China's commercial weather needs to be broken urgently . Strictly speaking, there is no typical commercial meteorological company in China at present, and the so-called commercial meteorological enterprise is in a parasitic state, which is only a commercial extension of the public welfare meteorological undertaking. Judging from the public information on the financial funds of the China Meteorological Administration, the scale of natural resources, marine meteorology and other expenditures in recent years is about 22 billion, of which about 6 billion is used for other meteorological affairs. The 6 billion basically determines the scale of China's commercial meteorology. The upper limit, and about two-thirds of the meteorological business is undertaken by the derivative enterprises of the relevant subordinate units, and the formal commercial meteorological output value scale does not exceed 2 billion. As of the end of 2021, there are about 16,000 companies whose business scope covers meteorology, more than 3,000 are operating normally, and only more than 400 are of a certain scale. Among these more than 400 enterprises, most of the business comes from meteorological bureaus at all levels and their affiliated units. This means that China's current commercial weather is still a part of public weather, not a real commercial weather. They are only providing services to public weather in the form of business, which is a parasitic part of China's public weather service system. a business climate. If this state is not broken, it will be difficult for China's commercial meteorological business to achieve real development.
(6) Information barriers of China's commercial weather. Basic information is the lifeline of the meteorological industry, including basic meteorological monitoring information, satellite data, radar data, sounding data, etc. There are both real-time data and historical data, which is a huge data system. Currently, only the systems affiliated to the China Meteorological Administration have the ability to aggregate these data. From the perspective of information security, basic meteorological information is still difficult to provide support for the development of China's commercial meteorology in an effective way. Without basic information, business climate is a tree without roots, and it is difficult to cook without rice. In recent years, the meteorological department is also exploring the establishment of new institutions, creating new platforms, and building a data bridge between public weather and commercial weather, so as to solve the problem of information acquisition in the development of China's commercial weather. But there are many problems on this front, and there may be a long way to go.
(7) The source of capital for China's commercial weather. The meteorological industry is currently one of the industries least favored by capital in the high-tech field, and its root cause is the problem of price discovery in commercial meteorology. Due to the difficulty of price discovery in commercial weather, it is not easy to form a clear market capacity, and there is no way to start with capital. Even venture capital is quite cautious in investing in meteorology. Recent investment and financing data show that the number of companies that have equity financing in the meteorological industry is less than 30. Among these 30 companies, less than 10 have gone through two rounds, and less than 5 have gone through three rounds. These enterprises with capital involvement also have a common feature, that is, their main business is to provide technical services for public meteorological undertakings, which belongs to the parasitic commercial meteorology mentioned above. Therefore, China's commercial weather needs more public capital participation, and only in this way can the development of China's commercial weather be promoted more quickly. With the continuous expansion of meteorological needs in megacities, government-led technology and financial capital may provide an opportunity for the development of commercial meteorology in China.
(8) The development prospect of China's commercial meteorology. The focus of China's commercial meteorological development is not in the field of disaster prevention. There is a certain market space only in high-impact and low-defense industries, and the scale is limited. However, in the field of meteorological resources development and utilization, the market size of China's commercial meteorology is huge. It can be integrated into various industries like salt and rejuvenate. Strictly speaking, meteorological resources are a broader concept than climate resources, with a shorter time line and higher exploitability. To sum up, meteorological resources can be divided into meteorological material resources, such as light, water vapor, air components, etc.; meteorological environmental resources, including atmospheric environmental resources, meteorological characteristics resources, etc.; meteorological energy resources, including wind energy, solar energy, air heat, etc.; meteorological culture Resources, including popular science, meteorological cultural tourism resources, etc.; as well as meteorological aesthetic resources, meteorological media resources. Due to the existence of certain technical barriers in meteorological disciplines, coupled with the shortage of talents, the development and utilization of meteorological resources in related industries has been relatively lagging behind and has been in a state of low competition. The best competition is to avoid competition. The difficulty of developing China's business climate is not a competition issue. After solving the problem of basic information acquisition barriers and talent shortages, it is likely to usher in a period of rapid development, which will gradually change the parasitic state of the entire industry. , towards a stronger and larger space.
(The author, Cai Yinyin, is currently the deputy director of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Meteorological Monitoring, Warning and Forecasting Center, the deputy director of the Shenzhen Meteorological Innovation Research Institute, the director of the Institute of Atmospheric Environment and Economics of Nanjing University of Information Technology, and a special expert of the Public Meteorological Service Center of the China Meteorological Administration. Zeng Won the first prize of Meteorological Science and Technology Innovation Award of Science and Technology Award of China Meteorological Service Association. Author of "Economic Methods of Air Pollution Control", "Geographical Distribution of Atmospheric Environmental Resources in China", etc.)
With the increase in the frequency of extreme weather around the world, meteorological issues have gradually moved from a marginal subject to a central position, attracting much attention. On April 28, 2022, the State Council issued the "Outline for High-Quality Development of Meteorology (2022-2035)" (Guo Fa [2022] No. 11), which once again ignited the market's enthusiasm for commercial meteorology. The development of China's commercial meteorology cannot avoid the following problems.
(1) The market positioning of China's commercial meteorology. In many reports on commercial weather, the commercial application of weather information is often placed in a prominent position, especially the application of weather disaster prevention. Positioning the primary market for commercial meteorology as meteorological disaster prevention is actually an illusion. On the one hand, affected by the inertia of meteorological public welfare thinking, disaster mitigation and prevention will intuitively be placed first in the development of commercial meteorology; on the other hand, considering the object of loss, meteorological defense will be mistaken for rigid demand. Actually this is wrong.
There are roughly two objects of work in the meteorological business, one is the prevention of meteorological disasters, and the other is the development and utilization of meteorological resources. For meteorological disaster defense, it can be divided into permanent defense and temporary defense. Improving the rainproof, windproof, and lightning protection grades of building design belongs to permanent defense, while temporary reinforcement during flood season belongs to temporary defense. With the continuous advancement of technology, the level of permanent defense is also getting higher and higher, and the demand for meteorological disaster defense is actually shrinking. In fact, the market capacity of defensive business weather is much smaller than imagined. In reality, we have to consider not only the physical effects of weather, but also the economic effects of weather. The physical impact of meteorology on agriculture is great, but the economic impact is not large, and it is enough to have public weather services. At the same time, there is also a hidden permanent defense level improvement in agriculture, such as improved wheat varieties to improve lodging resistance, which further compresses the actual demand for commercial weather in agriculture.
In other industries, industries with low impact and high defense, such as high-rise buildings, large facilities, special equipment, etc., do not actually need special meteorological information (except for extreme weather), and the historical meteorological data is used at one time in the design to prepare the defense level. enough. In industries with high impact and high defense, such as nuclear power plants, hazardous chemical production workshops, various warehouses, etc., meteorological information is often difficult to play a role, because their defense level has basically ruled out the impact of weather. The low-impact and low-defense situation is the focus of non-profit meteorological services, including people's travel, family life, and general production activities. The current weather forecast can fully satisfy them. In defensive commercial weather, only in industries with high impact and low defense , there is a real demand for commercial weather, which is the primary and clear issue for the development of China's commercial weather.
At the same time, considering China's large investment in non-profit meteorology, it will continue to meet the needs of defensive meteorology, which will further reduce the market space for defensive commercial meteorology. Therefore, the strategic positioning of China's commercial meteorological development should focus on the development and utilization of meteorological resources, rather than intuitive meteorological disaster prevention.
(2) The primary task of China's commercial meteorological development is price discovery. The essence of commercial meteorology is to use market means to meet meteorological needs, which is inseparable from the comparison of price and cost. The market first meets the needs of those customers who can afford the price, which is the first principle of the market economy. Only in this way can producers receive sufficient funds to provide better products, continuously improve technology and reduce costs. As production costs fall, producers can continue to meet the demands of customers who cannot afford high prices. From the perspective of the product life cycle, there are few customers who can afford high prices, and the vast majority of consumers can only accept a relatively low price. However, without those few high-priced customers, the cost of production will not be reduced, and ultimately, the needs of more low-priced consumers will not be met. There is a similar pattern in the market development of commercial weather. In the initial stage, the first task of commercial weather is to find customers who can pay high prices for specialized production, rather than mass production for more low-priced consumers. In most public welfare industries, the development of its commercial part has to go through such a process of price discovery, and the meteorological industry is no exception. China's commercial meteorology is still in its infancy, and improving the efficiency of price discovery is an important means to promote its rapid development.
(3) The product form of China's commercial meteorology. Forecast and live data are the main product forms of current commercial weather. On the one hand, they are influenced by traditional weather service models, and on the other hand, they are related to the market positioning of commercial weather. This situation has been deviated from the right track in a sense. Commercial weather should not be a porter of weather data, but a doctor, a cook, and a traffic policeman. Weather data is just the raw material for commercial weather, not what it ends up being. With the continuous advancement of information technology, some pseudo-commercial meteorological products have begun to wear the cloak of the digital economy, but in this way of changing the soup without changing the medicine, what consumers finally get is real-time data or forecast data, which is of practical help to them. Not big. In recent years, local meteorological departments and their affiliated units have made great efforts to improve the level of meteorological services and put forward the concept of refined services. But the real implementation work is still to distribute more and more detailed forecast data and real-time data. This is not a real refined service, and it is not what commercial weather should look like. The real demand of commercial meteorology is not simply the acquisition of meteorological data, but how to improve the efficiency of the use of meteorological data. The product form of China's commercial meteorology should be a data management system, a command system, and a decision-making system, rather than simply data display and data aggregation. The same is true in reality. A really good commercial meteorological product must be a data management product integrated into the industry, a product that helps solve meteorological problems, rather than a product that simply informs meteorological information. At the same time, the product design and development embedded in the industry is also complementary to price discovery. Good development is more conducive to price discovery, and good price is also conducive to better development. It is also a top priority to change the existing form of China's commercial meteorological products.
(4) There is a relative shortage of talents in commercial meteorology in China. From the technical level, meteorology is a typical high-tech industry, and talents are the key. However, the shortage of China's commercial meteorological talents is a fact. On the one hand, the development of China's non-profit meteorological undertakings has absorbed a large number of meteorological talents into the state-owned system. At present, the China Meteorological Administration system and its affiliated institutions have a total of more than 100,000 employees, including more than 60,000 active employees and more than 40,000 retirees, a huge number. On the other hand, the total number of meteorological talents trained in China is not large. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology has undertaken most of the training tasks for meteorological talents. There are more than 70,000 people in lightning protection, etc., and there are less than 20,000 meteorological science and technology talents in the strict sense. That is to say, if meteorological science and technology talents are willing to enter the national meteorological system, they are almost completely absorbed. Even if some do not enter the meteorological system, they may no longer work in meteorology. Although this situation has changed in recent years, the shortage of commercial meteorological talents in China, especially the shortage of high-level meteorological science and technology talents, is inevitable. In the short term, an effective way to solve the shortage of commercial meteorological talents in China is to improve the quality and efficiency of the existing meteorological system, and separate some meteorological professionals to engage in commercial meteorology. The institutional reform of the China Meteorological Administration, which has been brewing several times, should also pay attention to this issue.
(5) The parasitic state of China's commercial weather needs to be broken urgently . Strictly speaking, there is no typical commercial meteorological company in China at present, and the so-called commercial meteorological enterprise is in a parasitic state, which is only a commercial extension of the public welfare meteorological undertaking. Judging from the public information on the financial funds of the China Meteorological Administration, the scale of natural resources, marine meteorology and other expenditures in recent years is about 22 billion, of which about 6 billion is used for other meteorological affairs. The 6 billion basically determines the scale of China's commercial meteorology. The upper limit, and about two-thirds of the meteorological business is undertaken by the derivative enterprises of the relevant subordinate units, and the formal commercial meteorological output value scale does not exceed 2 billion. As of the end of 2021, there are about 16,000 companies whose business scope covers meteorology, more than 3,000 are operating normally, and only more than 400 are of a certain scale. Among these more than 400 enterprises, most of the business comes from meteorological bureaus at all levels and their affiliated units. This means that China's current commercial weather is still a part of public weather, not a real commercial weather. They are only providing services to public weather in the form of business, which is a parasitic part of China's public weather service system. a business climate. If this state is not broken, it will be difficult for China's commercial meteorological business to achieve real development.
(6) Information barriers of China's commercial weather. Basic information is the lifeline of the meteorological industry, including basic meteorological monitoring information, satellite data, radar data, sounding data, etc. There are both real-time data and historical data, which is a huge data system. Currently, only the systems affiliated to the China Meteorological Administration have the ability to aggregate these data. From the perspective of information security, basic meteorological information is still difficult to provide support for the development of China's commercial meteorology in an effective way. Without basic information, business climate is a tree without roots, and it is difficult to cook without rice. In recent years, the meteorological department is also exploring the establishment of new institutions, creating new platforms, and building a data bridge between public weather and commercial weather, so as to solve the problem of information acquisition in the development of China's commercial weather. But there are many problems on this front, and there may be a long way to go.
(7) The source of capital for China's commercial weather. The meteorological industry is currently one of the industries least favored by capital in the high-tech field, and its root cause is the problem of price discovery in commercial meteorology. Due to the difficulty of price discovery in commercial weather, it is not easy to form a clear market capacity, and there is no way to start with capital. Even venture capital is quite cautious in investing in meteorology. Recent investment and financing data show that the number of companies that have equity financing in the meteorological industry is less than 30. Among these 30 companies, less than 10 have gone through two rounds, and less than 5 have gone through three rounds. These enterprises with capital involvement also have a common feature, that is, their main business is to provide technical services for public meteorological undertakings, which belongs to the parasitic commercial meteorology mentioned above. Therefore, China's commercial weather needs more public capital participation, and only in this way can the development of China's commercial weather be promoted more quickly. With the continuous expansion of meteorological needs in megacities, government-led technology and financial capital may provide an opportunity for the development of commercial meteorology in China.
(8) The development prospect of China's commercial meteorology. The focus of China's commercial meteorological development is not in the field of disaster prevention. There is a certain market space only in high-impact and low-defense industries, and the scale is limited. However, in the field of meteorological resources development and utilization, the market size of China's commercial meteorology is huge. It can be integrated into various industries like salt and rejuvenate. Strictly speaking, meteorological resources are a broader concept than climate resources, with a shorter time line and higher exploitability. To sum up, meteorological resources can be divided into meteorological material resources, such as light, water vapor, air components, etc.; meteorological environmental resources, including atmospheric environmental resources, meteorological characteristics resources, etc.; meteorological energy resources, including wind energy, solar energy, air heat, etc.; meteorological culture Resources, including popular science, meteorological cultural tourism resources, etc.; as well as meteorological aesthetic resources, meteorological media resources. Due to the existence of certain technical barriers in meteorological disciplines, coupled with the shortage of talents, the development and utilization of meteorological resources in related industries has been relatively lagging behind and has been in a state of low competition. The best competition is to avoid competition. The difficulty of developing China's business climate is not a competition issue. After solving the problem of basic information acquisition barriers and talent shortages, it is likely to usher in a period of rapid development, which will gradually change the parasitic state of the entire industry. , towards a stronger and larger space.
(The author, Cai Yinyin, is currently the deputy director of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Meteorological Monitoring, Warning and Forecasting Center, the deputy director of the Shenzhen Meteorological Innovation Research Institute, the director of the Institute of Atmospheric Environment and Economics of Nanjing University of Information Technology, and a special expert of the Public Meteorological Service Center of the China Meteorological Administration. Zeng Won the first prize of Meteorological Science and Technology Innovation Award of Science and Technology Award of China Meteorological Service Association. Author of "Economic Methods of Air Pollution Control", "Geographical Distribution of Atmospheric Environmental Resources in China", etc.)
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