Research On The Definition And Valuation Of The Carbon Assets In Enterprise

With the further development of the low-carbon economy, low-carbon has become one of the environmental indicators that enterprise must acquire during their production and business activities. As the important participants in the low-carbon market, the emission-controlled enterprises need to find out how many carbon assets they have, and how to make profits from them so that the enterprises can achieve the maximization of the carbon assets’return, thus being prepared for the opening of national carbon market in 2017. However, the fact is another story. China has established 7 carbon markets in Shenzhen, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hubei and Guangdong for the purpose of developing the sellers and buyers and accumulating the experience of trading, and some enterprises suffer the loss in the trade of the carbon credits while the others make profits from it due to the poor understanding of the definition and valuation of the carbon assets. When it comes to carbon asset, the enterprises should bear four questions in head---what is carbon asset, where is it from, how can it bring the profit, and how many profit they can exactly bring.In order to answer the above questions, this paper will pursue a qualitative & quantitative analysis toward the carbon assets. At first, the paper lists the carbon assets in the enterprise and draws a definition of carbon asset with the methods of induction and formal logic after the research on the foreign and domestic documents relating the definition and valuation of carbon asset, which can be helpful to find out the carbon assets completely. Then the paper analyses the theories supporting the economic value of carbon asset which are externality, tragedy of the commons and Coase’s theory of property, and explains the four characteristics of carbon asset which are policy-attached, supply-limited, price-differed and investment profitable, and classifies the carbon assets into different groups according to their function market and generation source. Finally, the paper applies the three traditional valuation methods---relative valuation, income valuation and cost valuation respectively to the valuation of three kinds of carbon assets, which are based on the policy, CDM project and financial market. To assure that the reader can have a better understanding about the valuation process, the paper analyzes the valuations step by step in the examples, thus enterprises can know clearly about the economic value created by the carbon assets. In the relative valuation, the paper lists the basics of the 7 carbon market, and draws the sheet & trend line based on the daily report of trading from April,2015 to April,2016, and then the feature of the carbon market can be captured. In the income valuation, besides the common method which values the CDM projects by the future revenue directly, the paper comes up with new methods to do the valuation by contrast the enterprise values with or without the CDM project, which can be settled by the DCF model. Also the paper presents the reasons why there is a gap between the two methods. In the cost valuation, the paper calculates the acquisition cost of the carbon assets, which is the financing cost for the company. Thus the value of the carbon assets based on the financial market can be settled.