In the China market, polysilicon has been slightly shortage in supply because newly added mono-si wafer and multi-si wafer capacities cause difficulties to procure spot products. Therefore, mainland China's polysilicon price had reached RMB 125~127/kg, and it continued to move toward RMB 130/kg. Currently, inventories of major polysilicon manufacturers are nearly depleted and April’s orders were mostly finalized, so the market's focus shifted to May's orders. Although prices of downstream multi-si wafers and PV cells have started to drop, polysilicon's recent prices were maintained stably.
In the Taiwan market, polysilicon's price has been risen to US$ 13.5~14.5/kg as the China polysilicon market's average dealing price reached US$16.5/kg (US dollar exchanged from RMB). The upcoming trend of Taiwan's polysilicon prices is expected to keep on growing.
For the c-Si wafer segment, most multi-si wafer manufacturers' quote prices only slightly dipped or even stayed flat. PV cell manufacturers were having a hard time accepting this price trend due to rapid price fall of PV cells, so the market volume was not much. Nonetheless, when multi-si wafer's inventories accumulate and pressures pile up, multi-si wafer's price fall will accelerate. That phenomena will eventually reflect the price plunge of multi-crystalline PV cells.
Mono-si wafer's demand has been strong, so China's mono-si wafer's average price was maintained stably at RMB 6.7~6.8/pc. Taiwan's was ranged from US$0.91~0.93/pc. However, mono-si wafer's price should have reached this year's peak because multi-crystalline market's prices have been sluggish. Next month's price trend might start to become weak.
As for PV cells, in China and Taiwan, both regions’ PV cell manufacturers received orders way too concentrated in the previous quarter. Now this quarter's demand was suddenly frozen, and vertically integrated manufacturers dramatically slashed prices. In Taiwan, the price has astonishingly plummeted since March, and average price reached around US$0.31/W. In this week, price fall scale was again more than 2.5%.
Some of PV cell manufacturers with larger capacities already adjusted downwards their utilization to around 80%. Since China's domestic market demand slowed down quite significantly, PV cell manufacturers rose shipment proportions to other markets. India, with a relatively stable demand, became one of the critical target markets. Nevertheless, low-price markets kept on lowering PV cell manufacturers' average dealing price.
China's tier-one manufacturers hoped high-efficiency PV cell's price will be maintained within the range around RMB 2.4/W, but tier-two manufacturers continued to lower prices in order to maintain their utilization rates. On the whole, the demand was relatively weak and the price gap between China and Taiwan kept on shrinking. Taiwan's manufacturers' overall gross margins have plunged as well.
As for mainstream multi-crystalline modules, tier-one manufacturers' prices were held around RMB 3.8~3.9/W. However, China's large-scale PV power plants' demand has weakened drove tier-two manufacturers to lower prices to RMB 3.6~3.7/W. The price gap between tier-one and tier-two has been widen. Because the whole market demand has been cooling down, prices will remain a slow downtrend.