Battery fires linked to Samsung’s latest flagship Galaxy Note 7 has led to a major fallout in the smartphone market. “This incident exposes Samsung’s flawed strategy of allocating most of its smartphone battery orders to Samsung SDI,” said Duff Lu, research manager of EnergyTrend, division of TrendForce.
EnergyTrend, a division of TrendForce, reports that prices across the PV supply chain have collapsed to new lows in the second half of 2016 due to plunging demand. Furthermore, quotes of PV cells and wafers are not expected to bottom out this September. The current market analysis indicates that most manufacturers are not achieving profitability.
The latest lithium cell price report from EnergyTrend, a division of TrendForce, finds prices of cylindrical cells in the second quarter rose by 1~4% compared with the first quarter. During the same period, the overall production capacity of polymer cells also expanded, causing a 1~2% quarterly decline in polymer cell prices. In sum, the worldwide lithium battery market reached a healthy supply-demand balance in the second quarter.
The U.S. Department of Commerce has released the final ruling on its second review of the antidumping and countervailing duties (AD/CVD) rates on Chinese PV module imports for 2012. According to the decision, imports from major Chinese manufacturers will be affected by total rates ranging from 23.95% to 33.13%. In the preliminary ruling of the second review, some manufacturers were imposed with a CVD rate of 19.62%. The final ruling, however, has further reduced it to 19.2%. On the whole, the latest ruling does not have a huge impact on major manufacturers’ strategies for the U.S. market.
The global PV market has encountered a freeze in demand as it enters the third quarter, and declining orders led to rising inventories for wafers, cells and modules. “Prices in different sectors of the supply chain have kept falling through July due to the lack of demand,” said Corrine Lin, assistant research manager of EnergyTrend, a division of TrendForce. “The cell prices in particular have reached their historical lows during this off season.” EnergyTrend expects the situation in the August market to turn for the worst, and demand will probably not pick up even by the end of the third quarter.
