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The largest merchant solar cell producer, Neo Solar Power (NSP) with 2.2GW of capacity in Taiwan has drawn-up contingency plans to potentially offset any negative outcome of preliminary rulings on the latest anti-dumping investigation in the US.
Preliminary rulings countervailing duties are expected next week during one of the largest PV industry gatherings in Munich, Intersolar Europe, while anti-dumping rulings are expected next month.
NSP, like other merchant cell producers in Taiwan have benefited from Chinese PV module manufacturers outsourcing of solar cells to avoid previously instigated duties on Chinese produced cells for modules destined for the US market.
The strategy enabled Yingli Green, Trina Solar and others to continue to gain market share in the third largest PV market.
Speaking with PV Tech at NSP’s Headquarters in Hsinchu, Andy Shen, president of Neo Solar Power said that the company had strategies in place to tackle any eventualities.
Although hesitant to be specific, Shen was clear that plans included locating production outside Taiwan and had already been undertaking site selection analysis in other regions of the world.
“First of all its policy driven industry and how do we survive and prosper in such an environment, said Shen. “We have what if scenario’s…Our strategy includes A, B and C plans.”
Shen also noted that it wasn’t alone in looking at locating production outside Taiwan and highlighted that China-based manufacturers are doing the same due diligence.
Companies such as Canadian Solar have already located module assembly (500MW) in Ontario, Canada, while Yingli Green had plans several years ago to build an assembly plant in the US but the industry downturn thwarted those original plans.
Another major tier 1 producer, ReneSola has already diversified production to multiple key market regions by outsourcing over 1GW of module assembly to third party producers.
The NSP president felt that as the PV industry has continued to expand and expects PV market demand to be in the range of 45GW to 46GW in 2014, a natural next step for the industry was matching global demand with global manufacturing, despite the recent trend to consolidate the vast majority of PV manufacturing in Asia.
Shen also noted that although industry consolidation had been ongoing he had observed at the recent SNEC 2014 exhibition in Shanghai, China that companies outside the industry were still prepared to enter the market.
Without being specific, Shen noted that these China-based firms were large enterprises with significantly stronger balance sheets than pure-play China-based PV manufacturers.
Shen said that he expected key companies to globalise production in the future and that R&D activities would follow that trend, which would ultimately include NSP collaborating in these areas globally.
Manufacturing update
NSP has continued to benefit from the recovery in PV demand and the continued trend to outsourcing, primarily from tier-1 PV suppliers in Japan such as Sharp since mid-2013.
In October last year, Shen had told PV Tech that internal solar cell capacity expansions plans would be conservative and based on debottlenecking, efficiency gains and other productivity enhancements.
That would seem to have been the case as just over six-months later no new capacity expansion plans have been announced and a short guided tour of one of its Fab 2 multicrystalline cell production lines highlighted the maximisation of existing cleanroom space and high equipment utilisation rates using existing tools rather than the addition of selective new equipment.
However, whether it is anti-dumping duties or continued global demand increase, NSP like many other producers will soon have to decide on major new greenfield capacity expansions and whether the new capacity additions are based on next generation technology.
May 31, 2014
Source: pv-tech.org