PV Manufacturers Focus on Strategy Deployment as Downstream Market Demand Continues to Increase, says TrendForce

Demand in the China’s Distributed PV market continues to increase, which caused manufacturers to come up with solutions in response to the trend. From the 8th SNEC Exhibition, which ended last week, we can see that PV service integration has become the strategic focus for Chinese manufacturers.

“In order to respond to downstream demand growth, manufacturers have aggressively expanded their capacities through varying measures. For traditional, vertically-integrated manufacturers, capacity expansion is done mainly by outsourcing. Also, they have approached the small and medium size manufacturers for strategy partnership possibilities. Certain projects are even entering the phase for strategic alliance or directly into merger & acquisition stage. It shows that traditional manufacturers are adopting different business models to minimize risks while accelerating strategy deployments,” says Arthur Hsu, research manager of EnergyTrend.

On the other hand, newly joined forces, mainly wafer manufacturers, have gradually entered the downstream market. “Mono-si wafer manufacturers are optimistic about future growth for the China’s Distributed PV market, thus they have also started to produce modules in order to provide more compreshenive services to clients,” adds Hsu. Take Longi for example, apart from the mono-si wafer capacity expansion, the company released mono-si modules and expanded module capacity to 180MW to garner market share within the Distributed PV market. In fact, they are not only expanding mono-si module capacity in 2014 to meet the potential market demand, but they are also taking into consideration that the decreasing subsidies may make mono-si modules more competitive with better long-term profitability.

This Week’s Price Quotes

Impacted by the increase contract prices, polysilicon prices slightly increases by 0.04% to US$20.364/kg. Since first-tier manufacturers continue to further lower the prices, multi-si wafer price dropped 0.7% to US$0.997/piece, falling below the level of US$1.0/piece. Cell demand in the Chinese market has turned weak, with price quotes declining 0.53% to US$0.376/watt. Silicon module prices decreased 0.65% to US$0.61/watt. Due to the closing down of Masdar’s thin-film factories, thin-film module price declined to US$0.59/watt, with a 1.17% dip.