President & CEO of Qingyun Venture Capital(previously known as Tsinghua Venture Capital) Ye Dong was invited to Tsinghua SEM on Jan.12, sharing with students his experience as well as insights and visions towards the newly emerging investment area: the clean technology. Director of the Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Gao Jian presided over the activity.

Entitled " Clean Technology: new trend for investment", Ye Dong's speech started with talking about the current environmental reality inChina. Using the framework of "environment-energy-economy", the well-known venture capitalist analyzed the problems and challenges inChina's sustainable development. The long list of shocking facts and figures inChinaand world economic development presented by Ye Dong unveiled the other real aspect of economic growth which had been underestimated for a long time, that is, tremendous irreversibledamage has been caused as economy develops.

Ye Dong also talked about the historical development and present situation of environment industry in his speech. He noted that the investment on environment industries has been increasing in countries all over the world. For example, the environment investment accounted for 1%-1.5% of US GDP in 1960s, and such proportion increased to 2.5% in 1994, and it has exceed 3% in 2005. Now environment technology has been considered by venture capitalists as a new promising field for investment.

In particular, Ye Dong mentioned that the investment by venture capitalists in clean technology has been continuously on the rise. In the United States, for example, clean technology investments has kept growing for ten consecutive quarters, and hit a record high of $944, 000, 000 in the third quarter of 2006, which was a 110% increase over the same quarter last year, and accounted for 11% of the total of venture investments. Now the clean technology has become the third largest venture capital category in theUnited States, following the bio-tech and telecommunication.In his speech, Ye Dong made a brief introduction to several investment projects by China Environment Fund and others that have been listed on stock market, adding that there would be a clean technology boom in the future, as IT industry today.

Qingyun Venture Capital (previously known as Tsinghua Venture Capital) is the first and only one of its kind inChinafocusing on clean technology. The company's president Ye Dong had received the titles of "Most Proactive Venture Capitalist inChina", and "Top Ten Chinese Venture Capitalist". He was presented with Pioneer Award by Cleantech Venture Forum (U.S.) in 2005.