While there is no shortage of leading indicators in the PV industry that can be used to predict future trends in manufacturing and across the various companies involved in this space, one of the most pertinent ones relates to capital expenditure (or capex).
In the past few days, we have featured some of the key trends in the solar industry during 2016, including the changing face of c-Si cell spending and the strong capex into new facilities in countries such as Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. The technology split of solar cells produced in 2016 was also reviewed, showing the resilience of p-type multi and the factors that have been holding back further market-share gains for p-type mono.
Yesterday, we exclusively revealed the top-10 solar cell producers for 2016. In the second part of our top-10 series, we can now reveal for the first time the top-10 module suppliers to the solar industry for 2016.
There are many key metrics worth listing at the end of each year in the solar industry. In terms of the upstream/manufacturing side, two jump out as leading indicators for the year ahead.
The first is to rank the top-10 producers of the solar cells during the year.
New analysis by the in-house market research team at PV-Tech’s parent company Solar Media Ltd. can exclusively reveal that Hanwha Q-CELLS was the number 1 solar PV cell manufacturer in 2016, based on megawatts of cells produced in-house across the year.
Leading PV manufacturing equipment supplier Meyer Burger Technology has announced orders worth over US$146 million in the last four months, which includes a new order worth CHF 18 million (US$18.03 million) for its PERC cell technology and SiNA cell coating systems from two customers based in Asia.
Solar cells produced using p-type multi c-Si wafers retained their dominant market-share position in 2016, despite significant investments into p-type mono and advanced cell production, such as PERC. The transition to increased mono wafer use is now expected to be seen more clearly during 2017 and 2018, but depends still upon the relative end-market demand from the domestic Chinese market.
Capital expenditure (capex) for solar cell manufacturing is to see increased contributions in 2017 from Vietnam, India and Thailand, expanding the global footprint of cell manufacturing outside China across different countries in the Asia region.
Specialist PV manufacturing equipment supplier Amtech Systems has reported new solar orders since the end of September, 2016 have topped US$60 million, driven by PV manufacturers in China, Malaysia and Taiwan.
China-based integrated monocrystalline PV producer, Solargiga Energy Holdings has reported unaudited shipments and revenue for 2016, which highlights only a small year-on-year revenue gain, despite product shipments increasing 34% as ASP declines worsened in the fourth quarter of the year.
