This week, under the impact of the PV market’s gradually falling demand and increasing material price, the seesaw battle between the upstream and downstream is continuing. The prices in the supply chain is basically constant, with only the mono-si wafer price and multi-si wafer price showing slight changes. However, under the impact of the 2% devaluation of the US dollar, the quoted price in US dollar has increased after the conversion of the product price from RMB. Therefore, all average prices have gone up.
Polysilicon
Polysilicon price this week still remained at RMB147/kg. Although downstream demand is weak, it is still supportive. Due to future maintenance plan of silicon material plant, polysilicon price is expected to remain above RMB 135/kg while being in short supply in September.
Si-Wafer
Because of the plan of another leading manufacturer to increase its quoted price by RMB 0.05-0.1/pc, the average price of mono-si wafer has remained above USD 0.8/pc. On the contrary, for multi-si wafer, under the influence of the decreasing demand in China, the second-tier manufacturers have started to lower the quoted prices slightly. Owing to current high utilization rates of the downstream module manufacturers, there is a slowdown for the decrease in PV cell price. Also, because upstream polysilicon price is hard to decline, it is expected that si-wafer manufacturers will maintain or just lower the prices slightly. This will result in limited price declines for multi-si wafer in early September. Currently, the price of ultra high-performance multi-si wafer in Taiwan remains at USD 0.72-0.76/pc and the price in China is RMB 5.15-5.2/pc. The price of diamond wire cut multi-si wafer is RMB 4.6-4.7/pc.
PV cell
Because the downstream module manufacturers have put less pressure on PV cell manufacturers, the orders have become stable now. Most of the PV cell prices are steady, compared with the prices of last week. There is only a little decrease in multi-si PV-cell price in China, and the range has fallen to RMB 1.73-1.75/W. Prices of mono-si PV-cell and Taiwan’s multi-si PV-cell remain at RMB1.84-1.86/W and USD 0.235-0.237/W.
Module
Since the middle of 2017, prices of basic materials in China have surged rapidly. Module manufacturers have suffered the pressure in cost because they applied more materials. Plus, with the downstream demand of decreasing price, the profits for module manufacturers to gain are below 10%. After upstream PV cell’ssuffering of price squeeze late last month, the module section has received a larger space for manipulating the price now. Although the manufacturers plan to increase the prices, they have less chance to succeed. This week, though module prices are different because of the markets and strategies that each manufacturer needs to handle, the prices basically remained stable.