In order to cope with anti-subsidy regulations, China’s Customs Tariff Commission of State Council announced on September 18th that the provisionary anti-subsidy measures on imports of US solar-grade polysilicon, as suggested by Ministry of Commerce of People’s Republic of China (MOFCOM), will be put into practice by the form of security deposit from September 20th. In another word, the importers will have to pay security deposits to the Chinese customs when importing the product under investigation based on the ad valorem subsidy rate determined by this preliminary ruling.
While the measure may further decrease the import quantity of US polysilicon, the fact that US polysilicon accounts for the largest portion of China’s imports is unlikely to change anytime soon. Last year, Chinese imports of US polysilicon was 0.083 million tons and the proportion of imports from Germany, Korea, and US were 23.6%, 25%, and 39%, respectively. The proportion of imports from these three countries shifted to 23.7%, 29.3%, and 33.5%, respectively, from January to May this year. It shows the slight decline on the proportion of imports from the US.
Some people believe that China will announce the details regarding PV policies in 4Q13. By then, domestic PV market demand may significantly increase. However, due to the overcapacity of domestic polysilicon, polysilicon price is not likely to exceed US$20/kg. In addition, since polysilicon price has substantially declined compared to previous years and that production cost gap among manufacturers remains large, only few of the major Chinese companies will be able to continue survive in the industry. With industrial concentration becoming more apparent, polysilicon price in the industry will be difficult to increase significantly.