PV companies should be careful when building overseas

In order to avoid price commitments, more and more domestic photovoltaic companies are keen to build factories overseas or find OEM companies. In fact, there are not many successful cases for domestic photovoltaic companies to build factories overseas. There is a great deal of risk in overseas factories and it takes a long time to invest. Moreover, in order to prevent malicious acts, the European Commission intends to strengthen the supervision of Chinese PV companies' deliberate avoidance through overseas bases.

From August 6, 94 domestic PV companies can enjoy anti-dumping duties on exports of silicon wafers, batteries, and components to the EU according to the price commitment agreement. The condition is that the price of PV modules exported from China to Europe must not be lower than 0.56 euros per watt, and the total annual amount of solar modules must not exceed 7 GW. This price commitment agreement appeared for the first time in China-EU trade. For the Ministry of Commerce and the Electrical and Mechanical Chamber of Commerce, it is a victory for major political negotiations. For domestic PV companies, the significance is not significant. With a price of 0.56 euros, it is difficult for Chinese companies to sell. 0.56 euros gives Chinese companies no competitive advantage. Only when there is a gap in demand in the EU market and production capacity in other regions cannot be supplied will the products of a small number of Chinese companies be purchased. For most Chinese companies, quotas are actually 'insignificant'. "Prices and quotas in this commitment agreement are not constant. According to the latest news, future market conditions will change in May and June of this year. The minimum prices and export quotas that China needs to implement will be subject to fluctuations based on market conditions.

The latest documents show that Chinese manufacturers that transfer photovoltaic production facilities overseas will also be subject to supervision by the European Commission. The EU will require such companies to explain the purpose of transferring production. Companies need to prove that they have enough incentives to trade in production. If the company's behavior is obviously to circumvent the price commitment limit for export to the EU, it will be considered a violation of the price commitment agreement.

In fact, as early as in the 2011 US anti-survey investigations, China's photovoltaic giants had brewing overseas to build factories to evade tax risks, but ultimately found a better solution. As a response to the US PV dual-reaction strategy, domestic PV companies successfully avoided the risk of being imposed high tax rates by importing batteries from Taiwan. At present, domestic solar PV companies are doing more to build factories overseas. Only China Light and Power, Suntech and Artes have plants overseas. The establishment of overseas factories or OEMs does not change the industry’s dependence on exports and the idea of ​​relying on scale competition. Now that the state encourages the development of the domestic market, companies should “go global” on a domestic basis and rely on technological innovation to determine their advantages.

At present, there is still a gap between China's photovoltaic industry and the world's advanced level in terms of cutting-edge basic technology research, laboratory research and development, manufacturing of key and high-end production equipment, and research and development of new-generation photovoltaic cells. Therefore, the key to the transformation and upgrading of the entire photovoltaic industry is technology. In this context, photovoltaic companies are increasingly looking for ways to upgrade their own technologies. On July 25 this year, Hanergy announced the successful acquisition of GlobalSolarEnergy, a US company. The completion of this acquisition means that Hanergy has become the first company in the world to achieve mass production of flexible thin-film solar modules. This is not only an important milestone for Hanergy's global technology integration strategy, but more importantly, it will significantly accelerate the transformation and upgrading of China's photovoltaic industry.

In addition, the energy storage solution for Germany's photovoltaic self-generation home market, which was jointly developed by Sumida and Tianjin Electric Drive Design Institute Co., Ltd., has won a TUV-certified Chinese brand of energy storage products, attracting a large number of customers. Su Meida's technological innovation is not simply the pursuit of technical indicators, but the standard of whether it can be converted into products and output benefits. More and more domestic photovoltaic companies focus on technology development, which will bring hope to the photovoltaic industry at a stage of deep integration.