PVinsights : The uninterrupted weak demand made solar price drop further in April.

Without Chinese domestic demand recovery, Chinese module providers inclined to offer more attractive prices to obtain more orders. Moreover, more and more Chinese solar panel makers are planning to build up their facility outside China and aggressive to offer attractive price to American solar project developers or investors.

In Europe, EUR has depreciated back to around 1.08 against USD again, thus the demand diminished accordingly. Furthermore, even though European Commission has adjusted the MIP (Minimum Import Price) for Chinese solar module back to a higher level in April, Chinese module manufacturers circumvented this tariff by outsourcing manufacturing outside China and offered a lower price than MIP to keep their competence as well as secure the demand in Europe. On the bright side, the demand is reviving gradually in the US, but it was not strong enough to compensate the week demand in Japan and China. Without Chinese domestic demand recovery, Chinese module providers inclined to offer more attractive prices to obtain more orders. Moreover, more and more Chinese solar panel makers are planning to build up their facility outside China and aggressive to offer attractive price to American solar project developers or investors. American Solar system developers took the advantages of that and asked other non-Chinese solar module providers to have a lower price quotation now. Therefore, the module price in the US remained descending even with the recovering demand. In China and some emerging markets like India and Southeast Asia, Chinese providers, as aforementioned, started a price competition hoping to bring up more potential clients. As a result, the overall module price decreased this week.

Because the demand in China and Taiwan has no sign to recovery soon, in order to secure the limited orders, most major solar cell providers offered an attractive price for the fulfillment of their high production utilization. The 2nd-tier players have no choice but follow the price correction. Furthermore, major solar cell providers were not keen to slash their production utilization rate lower than 80 percent. The situation in Europe and Japan is not strong enough to balance the oversupply. Due to the dim demand, solar cell providers continued to have the price reduction to stimulate buyers to react.
Some major Chinese wafer makers tended to keep the wafer price stable so as to build up the inventory this week. However, most wafer suppliers had the tight cash flow so as not to be able to build up the inventory but have their continuous price corrections. On the other hand, to offset solar cell price decreasing, solar cell makers demanded the lower wafer prices from wafer makers to minimize their losses. To sum up, solar wafer prices this week continued to fall.
Poly-silicon prices had shown the consecutive price correction this week, because some major poly-silicon makers adjusted their prices seriously in China. On the other hand, major players would not like to offer the price lower than USD 16 per Kg. Without the lower offers from major suppliers, it is gradually to have the enough volume in the spot market. On the contrary, since the downstream PV component price is still with high stress, poly-silicon price had to follow the trend. To conclude, overall poly-silicon price went down constantly.

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