Last week, China government suddenly started to investigate thoroughly polysilicon material sources that circumvented China's anti-dumping and countervailing duties and smuggled to the Chinese market. This move worsened the availability of spot products for polysilicon in China. As a result, mainland China's polysilicon's price surpassed 130RMB/kg, and the orders of May were still undergoing negotiation.
Therefore, although downstream prices of multi-si wafer and PV cells started to drop, polysilicon’s price trend will maintain a slow growth until early May. The uptrend will be relatively eased during late May. Besides, polysilicon’s average price in the China market reached US$ 16.5~17/kg and triggered average prices in non-China regions such as Taiwan and South Korea to raise to US$13.5~14.5/kg. In the future, it might top US$ 15/kg.
As for si-wafer, most of China's multi-si wafers' quotes were modified downwards to around US$ 0.86/pc. Nonetheless, PV cell manufacturer whose PV cell prices were rapidly falling would like to fight for lower multi-si wafer prices, so the market volume was not much. In late April, multi-si wafers’ price fall will accelerate because of accumulated inventory. That phenomena will eventually reflect the price plunge of multi-crystalline PV cells.
Due to mono c-si wafers' skyrocketing demand, mono c-si wafer's price was maintained stably at around 6.7~6.8RMB/pc in the China market. In the Taiwan market, mono-si wafer's price was maintained at the range of US$0.91~0.93/pc. Nevertheless, sluggish multi-crystalline market will limite mono c-si wafer's price to reach another peak.
In view of PV cells in both China and Taiwan markets, PV cell manufacturers received orders way too concentrated in the previous quarter. Now this quarter's demand was suddenly frozen, and downstream vertically integrated manufacturers dramatically slashed prices. In Taiwan, the price has astonishingly plummeted since March, and average price has dropped from US$0.305/W. This week's price fall scale was not as dramatic as previous weeks', yet the reason was stress of going depict due to gross margin lower than 5%.
Since China's domestic market demand slowed down, manufacturers started to increase non-China markets' shipment proportion. India, with a relatively stable demand, became one of the critical target markets. Nevertheless, PV cell manufacturers' average dealing price has been dragged down by low-price market.
Moreover, mainland China's tier-one manufacturers hoped to maintain high-efficiency PV cell's price within the range from 2.3~2.35 RMB/W, but tier-two manufacturers continued to lower prices in order to maintain their utilization rates. On the whole, because the demand was relatively weak and the price gap between China and Taiwan was very small, the future PV cell price is predicted to continue to weaken.
As for mainstream multi-crystalline modules, downstream PV power plant developers knew that PV cell price dropped rapidly, so they kept on pressing module manufacturers. Hence, module price continued to fall slowly. Tier-one vertically integrated manufacturers could maintain their demand and prices via their own power plants. Tier-two or tier-three manufacturers' prices apparently remained weak.