Cloudy with a chance of bankruptcy: US tariffs hurt China's solar firms
The rain and gloomy skies during the SNEC PV Conference – the biggest in China's solar-panel manufacturing industry – summed up the mood in the market, whose major players congregated in Shanghai earlier this month for the four-day annual event.
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The scale was noticeably smaller this year. Several leading companies opted out for a variety of reasons, including tight budgets. More tellingly, CEOs from major producers Longi Green Technology and Tongwei – keynote speakers last year – gave it a miss.
The weariness is not surprising. The industry, billed as one of China's three new economic drivers along with electric vehicle and lithium battery manufacturing, is facing a double whammy: producers are swimming in a sea of red amid a price war and supply glut at home, while tariffs are blocking access to export markets.
Prices in every segment of the solar panel supply chain plummeted by 60 to 80 per cent in 2024 from a peak in 2023, according to the China Photovoltaic Industry Association, with 39 of the nation's 121 listed producers in the red. Losses in the photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing value chain reached US$40 billion, according to Gao Jifan, chairman of Trina Solar. Including other business lines, the tally was US$60 billion, he said.
'Everyone is questioning how deep and prolonged this downturn will be,' Yang Liyou, general manager of solar-panel maker Jinneng Clean Energy Technology, said at a panel discussion during the conference. 'It has not eased. In fact, it's become deeper and longer than we anticipated.'
Shares of Jinko Solar, the world's top solar panel maker in terms of shipment volume, have declined by nearly 30 per cent in New York this year, bringing the slump to more than 60 per cent from a peak in 2022. Rivals like JA Solar, Tongwei, Trina Solar, Longi, and GCL have slumped by as much as 80 per cent since 2022.
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