PVinsights: Euro depreciation and inventory adjustment lead an obvious price drop on Poly-silicon.

With the slow demand but the excess supply from the inventory adjustment and high production, poly-silicon prices show a significant price downtrend. The upcoming quarter financial results force poly-silicon suppliers to adjust their inventory to the reasonable levels.


With the slow demand but the excess supply from the inventory adjustment and high production, poly-silicon prices show a significant price downtrend. The upcoming quarter financial results force poly-silicon suppliers to adjust their inventory to the reasonable levels. Some poly-silicon makers are taking the benefits to offer the similar price in EURO terms and naturally makes poly-silicon price down in USD term recently. Moreover, some poly-suppliers are expected to have more production output while their new capacity will be ramping up within 1-2 quarters. On the contrary, the demand side is not expected to be recovery soon. What makes the situation worsen is that the downstream wafer price is unceasingly decreasing, the poly-silicon buyers request suppliers to follow the price correction at the mean time.
Overall module price goes down primarily affected by the slow demand and the EUR and JPY depreciation against USD. With the serve EUR depreciation against USD, European solar system investors are difficult to settle down the solar panel prices for taking the lost from the currency exchange issue and then this cause solar demand in Europe recovery more slowly. With the limited transactions in Europe, solar panel price still performed a downtrend mainly caused by the EUR depreciation. In China, the depressed demand leads to the module price decreasing continuously. Some 1st-tier producers offset their price pressure by shipping their products for their own system projects. Although some 2nd tier Chinese players are still intending to offer lower prices, they are not able to cut their price quote dramatically because the current low price level limits their rooms to cut seriously. In general, the price continues to head down, but it becomes tenderly, except Europe. The global solar panel price downtrend also affects that in the US and the solar developers in the US request solar panel makers to have the similar price corrections.
The depreciation of EUR severely impacts the cell procurement from Europe, because European cell buyers are losing their purchasing powers. Moreover, solar cell demand from Japan is also weak at the moment. Most major solar cell buyers heavily rely on the cell order from major Chinese solar panel makers. However, Chinese module manufacturers are not optimistic about global demand situation in the second quarter, so they tend to purchase PV cells conservatively and slowly. Therefore, the slack demand put the price pressures in both mono-crystalline and multi-crystalline ones. Nevertheless, some major cell players had secured the orders in early March so as to have less pressure at the moment. The 2nd tier companies tell a different story. In order to have the orders, they have to offer even lower prices than major players offered earlier. To conclude, the solar cell price pressure still remains but alleviates.
Major Chinese wafer makers intend to stabilize the wafer price by building up their inventories to 2Q15. On the other hand, some 2nd and 3rd-tier multi wafer companies are still adjusting their prices moderately. The Chinese domestic mono-crystalline wafer demand is gradually increasing, because major Chinese mono wafer suppliers are still offering the price reductions. However, in Europe and Japan, the currency depreciations negatively affect the mono demand recovery. As a result, solar wafer prices drop mildly to multi one and a little seriously on mono one.

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