Friday grab bag: ecommerce, solar, motorbike emissions, waste management
/A few things to round out the week that caught my eye:
Source: Google, Temasek
E-commerce: The government is targeting $35 billion in ecommerce sales by 2025. That compares to $4.6bn in 2019 and is above the forecast by Google Temasek and Bain report on their e-commerce in SEA. [Note that the article says e-commerce sales were already $12bn in 2019, so maybe the definition of e-commerce isn’t consistent.] The $23bn figure already implied at CAGR of 31%, and this ups it to 33%. However, this pandemic should really give e-commerce a shot in the arm, with sales up 20% yoy.
This $25bn would mean that there each shopper would spend $600 a year, accounting for 10% of retail sales. That seems pretty high to me, given that GDP per capita was just $2,600 in 2018. For comparison, in 2019, ecommerce sales in the US were at just below 14% of all retail sales at $602bn, but the US is 84x as big.
Source: World bank
Solar incentives in HCMC: Loyal readers of the blog know that I am very supportive of renewables. I wish we would take the opportunity of the COVID-19 stimulus to boost renewable investments. I am not sure that this is the reasoning behind this move in HCMC, but the city just signed MoUs with solar providers to promote rooftop solar. The city is also pushing residents to able to sell electricity back into the grid. There were some interesting stats in the article:
The city had a total of 6,835 roof solar power projects as of May 11.
The total capacity is 88.78 MWp
Electricity generated on the grid reached 30.49 million kWh.
I am not sure about the period of the above figure, but let’s assume it is since the beginning of the year. I don’t have recent per capita energy usage figures, but the 2014 figure was 1,400 kWh per capita (see chart), and I assume it could have grown to as high as 2,500 kWh now. That would be a 10% CAGR, in line with the prior period.
If it were 2,500 kWh per capita, then with that generation it could serve almost 30,000 people or almost 8,000 households. Not that much but a good start.
With the way that Vietnam is growing, it will probably need all sorts of electricity generation, even some that are not environmentally friendly. So anything that incentivizes renewables should be seen as a positive. Didn’t we all enjoy the low levels of pollution during the lockdown? This is a way to continue that.
Motorbike emissions tests: The city is also working to reduce air pollution by offering drivers incentives to get their bikes tested. This is a pilot program that gives incentives to drivers who test. I am not sure exactly how it would work, because I assume only those motorbikes that would past the tests would do them for fear that failure would result in a fine or confiscation. A real self-selection bias. But maybe if even those “better” bikes get tested and are therefore maintained better, emissions will fall.
“Associate Professor Ho Quoc Bang, Director of the Air Pollution and Climate Change Research Centre, said that if the city launched a programme to monitor motorbike emissions, a 30 percent decrease in air pollution could be achieved.”
I don’t know much about this, but I think a key component of this would be getting older bikes off the road, and that will be hard without the city giving monetary incentives or penalties to get them off.
More HCMC infrastructure: This time, combining three waste treatment plants into a new facility. Saves land, allows for renewed (hopefully much better) technology, and reduces cost. With flooding becoming a major issue annually in the city, any upgrade to sewage systems should be seen as a win.