GCL System Integration has bought a 51% stake in One Stop Warehouse, an Australian wholesale distributor of solar products, claiming it has been partly pushed by anti-dumping rules affecting its module supply business in Europe and the US.
The company said it and One Stop Warehouse had come to an agreement on sales distribution, future business planning and other aspects of strategy going forward. One Stop distributes PV panels, complete kits, inverters and components, with four offices across Australia.
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GCL System Integration (GCL SI) is an arm of GCL (Golden Concorde), based in China and the newest Silicon Module Super League member – a term coined by PV Tech to describe the handful of elite PV module makers with end-market shipment guidance of over 4GW for this year. GCL became the seventh member of the group less than a week ago, with all seven member companies headquartered in or heavily active in China’s PV market.
According to GCL SI, the acquisition is part of a move to “strategically enter the global market” with its own distributed PV integration unit and said it wishes to develop further business units, including energy storage. One Stop Warehouse made sales of just over AUS$45 million (US$34.71 million), clearing a profit of AUS$1.78 million last year.
A press statement issued by GCL System Integration called European and American rules on ‘dumping’ of competitively priced Chinese imported solar products as a “double anti” policy and said a number of Chinese companies are increasingly focusing on markets besides those two under what GCL SI called “huge pressure”. GCL SI said the EU and US had in place policies of “anti-dumping and anti-subsidy”.
In related news, GCL is scheduled to launch an energy storage product in Australia at the beginning of May. The company is hosting the event on the first day of the Australian Energy Storage Council conference, 4 May in Melbourne.