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As the global PV market is heating up, the solar industry synchronously enters into another consolidation period. While some solar PV companies has been struggling for financial crisis, profited and stable ones seize the opportunity to expand their market share through expanding production capacity, invest in new technology or merging with other manufacturers. Large companies would become even larger in the future, expects EnergyTrend.
Supply of polysilicon is the focus of the upstream PV supply chain in this year. Starting from 2015, the increasingly excessive supply of polysilicon has caused a spot price downturn in the supply chain. As a result, the bankruptcy of Taiwan Polysilicon Corporation will have no severe impact on Taiwanese and global PV supply chain because wafer manufacturers are accessible to polysilicon with lower costs.
Many international polysilicon manufacturers are expanding their production capacity with optimistic outlook for the future demand. Wacker now have 20,000 MT of annual capacity, OCI has debottlenecked and added 10,000 MT of supply, while Hanwha Chemical also added 3,000 to 5,000 MT of new polysilicon production capacity. Tokuyama’s Malaysian plant, a facility that has an annual capacity of 13,800 MT, has started massive production, and the utilization rate in 2015 is expected to reach 70%. In China, volume of polysilicon keeps soaring. GCL will add 25,000 MT of polysilicon, TBEA and Daqo both plan to add 3,000-6,000 MT of production volume. YongXiang Co. Ltd. also targets to increase its polysilicon production capacity by 10,000 MT in 2015. The additional production capacity is already higher than 70,000 MT, enough for producing 12-13GW of PV modules. As a result, the surplus supply of polysilicon will remain for a period.
In the midstream part of the supply chain, larger PV cell manufacturers stay on their vantage as well. Motech and TSi’s merger is the headline of recent PV cell manufacturing industry, and the merger will become effective in June 1st. In the meantime, many large makers continues expanding their production lines. For example, JA Solar, JinkoSolar and Trina Solar has already established, respectively, 400~700MW of additional PV cell production capacity in Malaysia or Thailand. Panasonic announced to invest US$80 million in adding capacity to next generation HIT high efficiency solar cells/modules because of the bright outlook for Japanese residential market as well as on the basis of the well performance of solar segment.
PV companies who have advanced technology and who seize the distribution channel will be more profitable in the future. In this wave of consolidation, these companies will improve efficiency and quality of their products, and will reduce costs by massive production or building exclusive distribution channels. These methods could help them become more competitive among their rivals.
This week’s spot prices
During this week, quote of polysilicon remained flat. The average quote slightly dropped 0.31% down to US$16/kg. The reduced price and surplus supply of polysilicon caused a decline to quotes of multi-si wafers. High efficiency multi-si wafers’ spot prices decreased to US$0.825/piece. Likewise, mono-si wafers’ spot price also dropped because the supply was not able to be consumed even though the demand was stronger in this week.
In terms of spot prices of PV cells, stronger demand to high efficiency multi-si cells successfully stopped the downturn, the quote rose to US$0.303/W. However, standard multi-si PV cells’ quote continued dropping due to sufficient supply. Taiwan-made multi-si cells’ spot price was US$0.289/W, while China-made ones was US$0.287/W.
PV module orders from overseas markets and abroad shipment has increased in this week, yet the demands are becoming polarized. Market demands to high output and low-cost modules both increased. Consequently, 250W multi-si PV modules’ spot price slightly dropped 0.93% to US$0.52/W. 265W standard mono-si PV modules’s quote slightly decreased 0.17% to US$0.6/W due to flat market demand.