Yingli sees sales contracts hitting 1GW by year end

Yingli Green Energy held an investor day on November 3, 2010 with key executive team members discussing the outlook for the company over the next year. Zongwei Li, Yingli’s director and CFO, began the day and highlighted that Yingli had obtained 575MW of purchases under legally binding sales contracts and anticipated the number to rise to 1,000MW by the end of this year. Most of the sales contracts have a required prepayment from the customers, although Li stated that Yingli is forecasting a somewhat flat trend in the average selling price during its fourth quarter, which will develop into a stable level in the first half of 2011, followed by a modest decline in the second half of next year.

Li also commented that shipments during 2011 should see a growth and in developing markets such as southern Europe, the U.S. and China. For 2010’s third quarter, Yingli is presuming a 20% improvement in shipments quarter-over-quarter, which will contributed to its speculated 31% to 32% gross margin for the quarter.  In addition, Li stated that Yingli has over 60% of its projected polysilicon needs for 2011 and hopes to see an additional 70% increase by the end of 2010.

Stuart Brannigan, managing director for Yingli Europe observed that due to the modifications and declines of feed-in tariffs in Europe and Germany, Yingli predicts that installations will see a shift to a smaller, individualized system for commercial and residential customers. Furthermore, Robert Petrina, managing director for Yingli America, anticipates closing 2010 with a 10% market share, which should be carried into and improved throughout 2011.

The company also touched base on improving its own technology. Jingfeng Xiong, VP of Technology, stated that Yingli is looking to enhance the conversion efficiency of its monocrystalline cells to 20% by 2012 and 22% by 2015. The expansion is set to fall back on the developments through Yingli’s Panda project, N-type-metal-wrap-through and heterojunction with intrinsic thin-layer cell technology.

Xiong also commented on Yingli’s multi-crystalline cell conversion efficiency with a continued goal to progress to 17.5% in 2011, 18% in 2012 and 20% in 2015.

Finally, Yuehe Zhang, Fine Silicon’s GM, anticipated that the monosilicon-based technology will reach US$30/kg in late 2011 with a strong potential to reach even lower levels in the future. 

Yingli is set to officially announce its official third quarter earnings on November 19.