Price support remains in China in December, According to EnergyTrend’s observation. Multi-Si wafers and cells from the overseas saw significant decline in prices after mid-December. Prices are expected to keep declining before the Lunar New Year.
The Chinese polysilicon market still witnessed short supply. Some manufacturers have increased their prices to more than RMB 140/kg. In fact, it’s because they don’t have that many supplies to sell. The average trading price of polysilicon reached RMB 135-140/kg. Since multi-Si wafer prices have started to drop, it’s estimated that polysilicon prices will peak in December and will begin to decline in January 2017.
Due to the depreciation of renminbi and lower cell prices, multi-Si wafer prices continued to reflect a downtrend in Taiwan. The average trading price of multi-Si wafers reached US$ 0.64-0.66/pc in Taiwan and RMB 5.0-5.1/pc in China. As downstream demand slightly turned weaker, the multi-Si wafer market will still see decline in prices, temporarily widening the price gap between multi and mono-Si wafers. On the other hand, supply shortage remained for mono-Si wafers. As a result, mono-Si wafer prices may be slightly revised in order to avoid affecting the future market share growth of mono-Si wafers.
Following the decline in multi-Si wafer prices, Taiwanese cells with efficiency above 18.4% are priced below US$ 0.23/W in late-December. Cells with efficiency of 18.2% also declined by US$ 0.05/W compared to last week. Mainstream cells are still priced at RMB 1.8-1.85/W in China. Yet, second/third-tier Chinese makers saw more substantial decline in prices. Meanwhile, due to lower PERC module prices, the average trading price of mono-Si PERC cells dropped below US$ 0.32/W, no longer saw high gross margin like last month. Price drop will be more significant in January 2017.
Global module prices continued to reflect a downtrend. Deducting the freight fees, there’s barely a price gap among the US, European, Japanese, and Chinese markets. Module prices in the Indian market has dropped below US$ 0.32-0.35/W. On the other hand, manufacturers have announced that prices will still decline substantially in 1Q17. In other words, next year will remain challenging.