China’s solar panel manufacturers, who dominate global sales with a two-thirds market share, are confronting growing trade and financial problems, a Chinese industry official acknowledged Tuesday, shortly before one of the industry’s largest companies, Trina Solar, announced weak results for the second quarter.
The Chinese manufacturers “face challenges of decreasing margins, decreasing exports, lack of capital, protectionism and an external environment that continues to deteriorate,” said Chen Huiqing, the deputy director for solar products at the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products.
The US Commerce Department has already imposed preliminary anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese solar panels totaling over 33 percent, although these tariffs are subject to further review by the department this autumn that could raise, lower or even repeal them. A coalition of solar manufacturers in Europe has asked the European Union to impose anti-dumping tariffs as well.
Chen, who was the lead speaker Tuesday morning at the Guangzhou International Solar Photovoltaic Exhibition here in southeastern China, said that a team of representatives from the Chinese industry is now in Brussels in an effort to persuade European officials not to start a trade investigation into Chinese solar panels in the coming weeks.
Trina Solar, one of the largest Chinese solar manufacturers, announced Tuesday that it had lost $92.1 million on sales of $346.1 million in the second quarter. Ferocious price wars in the industry eroded overall revenue, even as the volume, measured by wattage, of solar module shipments continued to increase.
Solar panel exports had soared over the past five years to become one of the largest single categories of China’s highly diverse exports, representing a little over 1 percent of the total. The EU, the leader in deploying solar panels through extensive government subsidies, buys five times as many solar panels from China as the United States, making the EU trade decision especially crucial for Chinese manufacturers.
But the value of Chinese solar panel exports has already dropped 30 percent in the first six months of this year compared to the period last year, as prices have tumbled.
A series of bankruptcies of solar manufacturers in the United States and in Germany has created political pressure for action against China, where the government has made it a national priority to expand renewable-energy manufacturing capacity.
As new solar panel factories continue to open in China, the industry’s surplus capacity increases, along with downward pressure on prices, said Yotam Ariel, the managing director of Bennu Solar, a research company in Shanghai.
“Everyone talks about the struggle of the US producers, but it seems like the Chinese producers are in a struggle of their own,” he said.
The Chinese Commerce Ministry has complained repeatedly, most recently in a statement on Monday night, that renewable energy programs by five state governments in the United States discriminate against imports from China, but has not said whether it might file a challenge at the World Trade Organization. The ministry is also investigating a complaint from Chinese industry that the United States is exporting polysilicon, the main ingredient for solar panels, at prices below manufacturing costs.
US companies have contended that their polysilicon prices are low because they rely on very inexpensive hydroelectric power in Oregon, and energy is the biggest single cost in polysilicon production. Chinese polysilicon producers, the main beneficiaries if China restricts imports from the United States, rely heavily on coal-fired power and have a history of toxic chemical spills.
Solar panels are sometimes compared to batteries because it takes so much electricity to make the polysilicon that it can take up to two years for the panel to generate enough electricity to offset the power that went into its initial manufacture.
