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| Author | InfoLink |
| Updated | October 19, 2017 |
China’s PVCEC and Taiwan’s PV Taiwan both took place this week. On the PVCEC, Wang Bohua, Secretary General of China’s PV Industry Association indicated that the newly-added installation reached 42GW from January to September in China, up 60% from the same period last year. The distributed generation (DG) installation reached 15GW, up more than 300% from the same period last year.
For PV Taiwan, just as Gintech, NSP, and Solartech announced their merger for 3Q18 this Monday, Motech soon announced a joint venture with Giga Solar called Taiwan Solar Module Manufacturing Corp. (TSMMC). These made “alliance” the key word of the PV Taiwan this year.
Aside from the more significant decline in Taiwanese cell prices, prices for other sectors of the supply chain didn’t fluctuate much during the exhibition this week in Taiwan.
Poly
It’s difficult for wafer makers to accept the rising polysilicon prices. The average trading price of polysilicon still stuck at RMB 148-150/kg in China. The short supply of polysilicon continues in the overseas. It’s difficult to purchase polysilicon with US$ 14/kg recently, but the price increase has stopped.
Wafer
The negotiation of wafer orders will peak next week. Therefore, there were not many new orders placed this week, leading to flat wafer prices.
Cell
Taiwanese cells with higher prices previously began to drop. The average trading price of conventional multi-Si cells reached US$ 0.227-0.23/W this week. Due to the weaker demand of high-efficiency mono-Si products, PERC cell prices dropped continuously to below US$ 0.30/W this week. As Taiwanese cell prices begin to drop, the cell price trend is expecting to be affected in third-party countries soon, while Chinese cell prices mostly stayed flat this week.
Module
Following the weaker cell prices, module prices have rooms to drop further too. Europe is still a region with more significant decline in module prices recently. As the International Trade Commission (ITC) will announce the result for the “Section 201” in November, the installation boom in the US has slowed down. After the demand slowly weakens in Europe and the US, the uncertainties later on still lies in whether the Chinese DG subsidies will be lowered on January 1st as expected. Yet, the installation boom caused by the lower subsidies hasn’t showed, whether the DG subsidies will be lowered recently should be paid attention to.