European solar PV module and component buyers’ sentiment improved significantly in January 2026, to levels not seen since last Spring, amid largely stable solar module prices on the continent.
This is the main takeaway from sun.store’s latest pv.index report, which collates module and component prices, and assesses general industry sentiment in Europe, on a month-by-month basis. Published last week, the report includes a PV Purchasing Managers’ Index (PV PMI) metric that assesses optimism for the solar industry among sun.store users. It gives a PV PMI of 69, the highest figure reported since the figure of 70 in May 2025, and a significant increase over the all-time low of 62 that featured in the December 2025 edition of the report.
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These positive sentiments follow cautious optimism expressed at last week’s Solar Finance & Investment Europe summit, hosted by Solar Media in London, in both cases stemming from relatively stable, or even increasing, prices of solar modules. The report notes that the average price of a bifacial tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) module solar in Europe reached €0.095/Wp (US$0.11/Wp), an 8% month-on-month increase.
Monofacial TOPCon modules, meanwhile, saw a 1% month-on-month increase in price to €0.099/Wp, while passivated emitter rear contact (PERC) and back contact (BC) modules saw stable prices, as seen in the graph below.
The only exception to this trend is the decline in prices for full black modules, but the report describes the overall trend—with this module type losing just €0.004/Wp from its average selling price from one month to the next—as “flat”. In the report, sun.store described these pricing trends as a “normalisation” and a return to standard operating procedure after “the unusual price inversion” in late 2025, where the average selling prices of modules, particularly bifacial TOPCon and BC technologies, saw significant declines.
Indeed, this end to a bottoming-out of prices, and a stabilisation, or even increase, in other prices, could be the result of several leading Chinese manufacturers’ efforts to cut production and stop the destructive race to the bottom on pricing that characterised much of last year. Considering the influence Chinese manufacturers have on the production of solar components, particularly upstream elements such as inverters, shifts in the Chinese market can have a significant impact on both European activity and general market sentiment.
Last summer, Chinese polysilicon producers announced plans to cut production by one-third to restore the imbalance of supply and demand in the global solar supply chain. Then, last week, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA) announced that it expects a slowdown in new solar capacity deployment in 2026, as the industry moves towards slower and more stable growth following untenably high deployment figures, and untenably low component prices, in 2025.
The sun.store report also shows similar stabilisation and growth in the average selling price of inverters in Europe. The price of hybrid inverters, for instance, increased, for both inverters of smaller than 15kW and those larger than 15kW, increasing from €96.31/kW to €97.09/kW and from €86.24/kW to €86.06/kW, respectively. On-grid inverters larger than 15kW also saw a price increase from €26.12/kW to €26.66/kW.
The only exception to this trend was the price of on-grid inverters smaller than 15kW, which saw their average selling price decrease from €45.22/kW to €43.51/kW.
‘Ongoing brand momentum’ among module and inverter manufacturers
The sun.store report also includes data on the relative popularity of module and inverter brands in Europe, and January saw significant changes in the module landscape. Longi, which had been the number one brand in November and December 2025, fell to the fifth-most popular brand in January 2026, to be replaced by Trina, which was only the third-most popular brand in the previous month.
The report argues that the changes in module supplier popularity are mostly restricted to existing industry heavyweights, suggesting that there are “shifting short-term demand patterns”, rather than reflecting a sudden “loss of competitiveness among incumbent manufacturers”.
There was more stability in the inverter space, with Deye maintaining its position as the most popular hybrid inverter brand, while GoodWe and Fronius maintained the fourth and fifth positions, respectively. String inverters, meanwhile, saw Huawei and Sungrow hold the top two spots, as they have done since August 2025 and October 2025, respectively, which sun.grow reflects “ongoing brand momentum” among the industry leaders.
