China BACS market report

Building automation control system (BACS) is a sub-system of intelligent building, and intelligent building is one of technical measures to achieve green building and the main part of smart city.  In the past years, China has strengthened to develop smart city and green building and identified their strategies in the “13^th Five-year Plan”, as well as local governments also released related policies, which will bring a leap-forward development for building control industry.

ChinaIOL released “2016 Annual market report of China building automation control system”, presents Chinese market in six parts covering current states, industry environment, market share and main components.

Industry environment

1.       Domestic building market

In the past ten years, China national economy has remained rapid and stable development and continually expanded the fixed asset investment, which bringing building industry a good development environment.  The output value of China building industry kept 20% of growth rate before 2011, but the growth rate of real estate investment slowed down in 2014 and 2015.  In 2016, impacted by national loose monetary policy, the domestic building industry rebounded and reached 19,400 billion yuan of annual output value.

2.       Green building market

China’s building energy consumption accounts for over 30% of national total energy consumption, which impacting on the establishment of energy saving society and sustainable development of Chinese economy.  Green building and intelligent building are two highly relevant concepts.  In recent years, China intensively released related policies on green building, which will benefit to existing building retrofitting and BACS market.

Share of green buildings in new buildings

3.       Smart city development

“Smart city” was firstly appeared in the government working report in 2015.  Until June of 2016, more than 500 cities in China have identified “smart city” in their working reports, or are establishing smart city.

Overall market

1.       Large scale and strong impetus

Currently, BACS is mainly applied to large commercial buildings, with up to 60% share of office buildings and department buildings.  BACS market remained a high growth rate after “12th Five-year Plan” and reached 6.59 billion yuan in 2016 and predicted to 10 billion yuan by 2019.

China BACS market development in 2017-2019

2.       Local markets

Looking at the regional markets, East, South, North and Central regions of China are the most important intelligent buildings markets, with East of China as the largest one accounting for 40.1%.  With the implementing of national policy on “coal-to-gas”, the share of central heating in northeast and northwest regions increased, as well as the increase of green buildings share, which all benefit to BACS market.  In the future, the markets in northeast and northwest regions will also increase.

2016 China BACS regional markets

Industry status

1.       Dominated by foreign brands

Foreign brands dominated the most of Chinese BACS markets, with the share of local brands less than 10%.  Four giants including Honeywell, Schneider, John Control and Siemens account for over 70%.

2.       Unreliable system

BACS is not a kind of modular product.  Initiated from communication with clients and program discussing to installing and servicing, each stage needs to be well designed, otherwise, the system cannot bring the clients real convenient and energy efficient effects.  As statistics, only 3% of BACS in China are operating effectively.

3.       Poor performance of core components

As reported, the number of China BACS related enterprises are over 3 000, but few of them own research and development ability, especially in the core components, such as sensors.

Future trend

1.       Broadly prospect for EMC

Energy management contracting (EMC) is a kind of energy saving investment which use the saved energy cost to pay the lifetime operating cost.  This kind of investment allows end users to upgrade the building and equipment by future energy saving benefits, reduce current operating cost and increase energy efficiency.  Facing to high energy consumption buildings in China, the central government proposed to complete 0.5 billion SQMs of existing building energy retrofitting and 0.1 billion SQMs of public building energy retrofitting in “13^th Five-year Plan”, as well as regional markets following up, which will bring a broad market for EMC.

2.       “Space” structure system

In 2017, Ministry of housing and urban-rural development of China (MOHURD) release “Assembly Building Act in 13^th Five-year Plan”, and pointed out that new intelligent system should feature “modular and assembly”.  So called “space” structure system, all of terminal units in the space can realize coordinative operating and distributed control.

3.       BIM application

Building information modeling (BIM) exhibits not only 3D space itself, but also linking the 3D to the related materials, time, money and labor, leading the building to more broadly application field.  Using BIM in the design and service of BACS can realize more scientific system design and visualized inner space, which make the operators understand all different equipment and their energy consumption, so as to achieve high efficient management.