All assets of GSF Capital and its senior manager, Javier Romero have been frozen by an Italian court over claims that Suntech and its chairman and CEO, Dr. Zhengrong Shi were victims of fraud. The court also appointed a manager to take control of the Fund, though Suntech did not provide further insight into how the affair happened.
To avoid further drains on its battered balance-sheet, REC said it would start winding-up REC Wafer Norway via bankruptcy proceedings. The solar wafer operations at two sites in Glomfjord and at Herøya have already been permanently closed down. The bankruptcy of REC Wafer Norway was said to not have an effect on REC Solar and REC Silicon operations, which continue to operate as normal.
AEG Power Solutions has announced the expansion of its product portfolio with a new central inverter with 630kW capability. Protect PV.630 has an efficiency factor of 98.4%. With an appropriate transformer, it can also be adapted to the medium voltage grid (e.g. 10, 20, 33kV). The new inverter is said to be the company’s next step in offering high-end utility-class inverters.
Still in a restructuring and refinancing phase, designed to make the company more flexible and operate sustainably during dynamic changes in the solar industry, systems integrator, Phoenix Solar reported sales for the second quarter of 2012 as €46.5 million. This constitutes a 57.1% decline when compared to the same period a year ago. The company made a loss of €13.0 million, though refinancing of over €100 million was secured to enable the company to restructure.
Despite a 13% increase in sales for its fiscal third quarter, specialist PV equipment supplier, Amtech Systems has implemented new cost cutting measure to tackle the downturn that has proved to longer and deeper than expected. The cost reductions include voluntary salary reductions by management ranging from 10 to 20% and salary reductions of other corporate staff.
Despite improving business conditions for its US residential and utility-scale businesses that have led to capacity utilization rates topping 90%, SunPower’s management ruled out the need for a capital spending increase. Debottlenecking and new process migrations for all lines at Fab 2 and Fab 3 would negate the need for a new capital equipment spending cycle until some time in the first-half of 2014, which would then require the construction of Fab 4.
The US residential solar lease market remains highly competitive with a new deal struck by SunPower to access US$325 million in new finance from 2-major investment banks, Citi and Credit Suisse. The new financing comes soon after major competitors in the third party leasing market, SunCity and Sunrun received significant new funding from Credit Suisse to the tune of a combined US$300 million in late July, 2012.
Tough times across Sharp Corporation’s electronics sectors filtered down into its solar manufacturing arm in its first quarter sales for the current financial year. Overall, Sharp posted quarterly losses of ¥138.4 billion (US$1.76 billion) on net sales of ¥458.6 billion. Sales within its solar cells segment were down 18.2%, compared to the same period in the previous year at ¥41.9 billion (US$534 million), generating an operating loss of ¥6.9 billion (US$57.5 million).
New orders for PV equipment suppliers recently reached a critical low point when SEMI posted a PV book-to-bill ratio of 0.40 for the first quarter of 2012. However, market conditions look to have worsened in the second quarter after leading equipment supplier GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT) reported new order intake of only US$13.8 million, while a negative adjustment to its strong order backlog totalled US$31.9 million.
Major restructuring efforts at First Solar took a backseat during the company’s second quarter conference call as management focused on a significant increase in its PV project pipeline. First Solar said it had added almost 1GW of new projects to a pipeline that previously stood at 2.9GW. Net sales were US$957 million, up from US$497 million last quarter while revenue guidance was raised for 2012 to US$3.6-US$3.9 billion, up from a range of US$3.5 billion to US$3.8 billion.
