On July 18, the renowned global business magazine Fortune China released its 40 Under 40 List for 2023. Wang Yang, Founder and CEO of NaaS (NASDAQ：NAAS), was selected for this prestigious honor. Founders of some well-known emerging companies, such as SHEIN, miHoYo, and RoboSense, also made the list. These young business elites are leading the changes in China's business world.

Since 2011, Fortune China has been publishing the 40 Under 40 List with the aim of discovering outstanding young innovators, value creators, and change-makers in China. This list is known as the "cradle of business stars" and has become one of the influential platforms for recognizing young leaders. The 2023 list includes business elites from various fields, including new energy, new consumption, artificial intelligence, and intelligent driving, who are leading the transformations in the Chinese business world.

At Fortune’s award presentation, Wang Yang was introduced as a former journalist who graduated with a journalism degree from Renmin University of China. She believes that the energy sector is fundamental to the economy, and almost all economic activities, whether those of transportation, logistics, or mobility field, are inseparable from the support of the energy sector. The presenter quoted her as saying "Reducing emissions from fossil fuel stocks and replacing fossil energy with incremental renewable energy is the only way for China's transportation sector to achieve carbon neutrality, and also the practice that can NaaS has always adhered to."

As a “connector” in the new energy sector, NaaS connects various participants in the industry chain, such as charging pile manufacturers, charging station operators, and OEMs. The company provides one-stop services to the industry, including planning and design, site selection consultation, EPC engineering, peration and maintenance, station management, as well as energy storage, photovoltaics, and virtual power plants. By leveraging digital technology and artificial intelligence, NaaS enhances industry efficiency. As of March 31, 2023, NaaS has covered 55,000 charging stations and connected 575,000 chargers. In the first quarter of 2023, NaaS achieved a charging volume of 1.023 billion kilowatt-hours, accounting for 21% of the national public charging volume.

In March this year, NaaS pushed towards technological innovation by introducing independently developed automatic charging robots with autonomous vehicle positioning, intelligent charging, automatic payment settlement, and other functionalities to cater to the charging requirements of public parking lots, closed-field parks, and other infrastructures. Additionally, NaaS aims to align these charging robots with future unmanned driving scenarios and provide users with intelligent and unmanned charging services experience.

Since the beginning of this year, policies such as "Power Demand-Side Management Measures (Draft for Comments)", "Power Load Management Measures (Draft for Comments)", and "Blue Book on the Development of New Power Systems" have been successively released, ushering in an accelerated period of constructing new electric power systems. In response to this industry trend, NaaS has launched a virtual power plant product with charging stations as the core scenario. It aggregates various load resources such as charging piles, photovoltaics, and energy storage. Through flexible management, intelligent dispatching, and energy control enabled by PV-storage-charging stations, it responds to grid dispatching needs, participates in power market transactions, and helps charging stations reduce energy costs. Last summer, NaaS, in order to assist power supply departments in relieving grid pressure in the Wuhan, aggregated multiple charging stations operated by several charging station operators and actively responded to peak load shaving demands, which achieved an effective response rate of 63.78%. Recently, NaaS' Virtual Power Plant (VPP) has passed the capacity test of Shenzhen VPP management platform, China's first grid-ground integrated VPP operation management platform, thus was accredited as a Shenzhen VPP load aggregator.

In terms of corporate social responsibility, NaaS focuses on greenization at the source, greenization of stations, and greenization of usage to promote the green and low-carbon development of the industry. In 2022, NaaS achieved a carbon reduction of 1.8477 million tons for the whole year, an increase of 106.22% compared to that of 0.896 million tons in 2021. The electricity trading purchase volume was 439 million kilowatt-hours, of which 393 million kilowatt-hours were from clean energy sources (photovoltaics, wind power, hydroelectric power), accounting for 89.52%.

Currently, China's new energy vehicle production and sales have ranked first in the world for eight consecutive years, with a global market share of over 60%. According to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, from January to June 2023, China's sales of electric vehicles reached 3.747 million units, an increase of 44.1% compared to the same period last year, and the market share reached 28.3%. It is expected that the sales of electric vehicles in China in 2023 will reach around 9 million units, and the market penetration rate will increase from 25.6% in 2022 to about 32%. According to statistics from China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance (EVCIPA), the cumulative number of charging infrastructure in the country reached 6.652 million units, a year-on-year increase of 69.8%. Since the beginning of this year, relevant departments have made clear deployments to promote the consumption of electric vehicles in rural areas, drive the planning and construction of public charging infrastructure, and accelerate the construction of new power systems. The National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration have issued implementation opinions, and local governments have introduced detailed support policies, opening up greater space for the continuous development of the electric vehicle and related service industry.

Being in the world's largest new energy market, NaaS' development has attracted global capital attention. In May, NaaS completed a new round of SPO and received strategic investments from Dr. Adrian Cheng, a third-generation member of the Cheng Yu-Tung Family in Hong Kong, and CST Group Limited (00985.HK), an established listed company in Hong Kong.

NaaS' unaudited financial statement for the first quarter of 2023 shows a net revenue of RMB 36.2 million, a 150% increase compared to the same period last year. NaaS estimates that its net revenue for the 2023 fiscal year will be between RMB 500 million and RMB 600 million, with a year-on-year growth of 5-6 times.