Prices have been the most stable in the polysilicon market compared with other sectors of the supply chain because mono-Si wafer suppliers have generated considerable demand with their capacity expansion efforts and multi-Si wafer suppliers only lower a small proportion of production. In China, the average spot price has remained fairly high during this month, fluctuating only slightly between RMB 140 and 144 per kilogram. Price trend in China is expected to stay steady going into August. Polysilicon prices outside the Chinese market, however, have fallen a bit since other regional markets do not have trade barriers that interfere with the pricing.
Multi-Si wafer prices have declined significantly in connection with plummeting cell prices. In August, the average trading price of multi-Si wafers has dropped below US$ 0.74 per piece in Taiwan and below RMB 5.55 per piece in China. The rough market condition will cause wafer prices to decline further.
Mono-Si wafer suppliers have recently slashed their prices to limit the overall price gap between their products and the multi-Si counterparts. The average trading price of mono-Si wafers has arrived at RMB 6.1-6.2 per piece in China and US$ 0.84 per piece in Taiwan. Due to high cost advantage of Chinese mono-Si wafers and rapid expansion of two major leading mono-Si wafer companies, mono-Si prices can still be adjusted to remain competitive against multi-Si products.
The cell market continued to see weak prices in August, with prices reaching below US$ 0.253/W in Taiwan. Since cells are now being produced at a loss, compared with Chinese suppliers, Taiwanese cell makers have made larger reduction to their capacity utilization, by margins of 40% or more. Due to lower manufacturing cost, Chinese suppliers can still tolerate further price decline, with current cell prices dropping below RMB 1.93/W.
In the mono-Si cell market, aggressive pricing from the Chinese suppliers has caused prices to plunge. Prices have declined below US$ 0.265/W. The rapid decline of regular cells has caused PERC cells and cells made in third-party countries to decline as well.
Module stock level has increased substantially. Many module makers have stock that can supply more than two months of demand, leading to record low bidding prices for Chinese power plants - RMB 3.2-3.4/W. Due to the lack of exports, second-tier makers had to lower the prices even more, which accelerated the decline in module prices in China.