Cloudy with a chance of bankruptcy: US tariffs hurt China's solar firms
The rain and gloomy skies during the SNEC PV Conference – the biggest in China's solar-panel manufacturing industry – summed up the mood in the market, whose major players congregated in Shanghai earlier this month for the four-day annual event.
Advertisement
The scale was noticeably smaller this year. Several leading companies opted out for a variety of reasons, including tight budgets. More tellingly, CEOs from major producers Longi Green Technology and Tongwei – keynote speakers last year – gave it a miss.
The weariness is not surprising. The industry, billed as one of China's three new economic drivers along with electric vehicle and lithium battery manufacturing, is facing a double whammy: producers are swimming in a sea of red amid a price war and supply glut at home, while tariffs are blocking access to export markets.
Prices in every segment of the solar panel supply chain plummeted by 60 to 80 per cent in 2024 from a peak in 2023, according to the China Photovoltaic Industry Association, with 39 of the nation's 121 listed producers in the red. Losses in the photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing value chain reached US$40 billion, according to Gao Jifan, chairman of Trina Solar. Including other business lines, the tally was US$60 billion, he said.
'Everyone is questioning how deep and prolonged this downturn will be,' Yang Liyou, general manager of solar-panel maker Jinneng Clean Energy Technology, said at a panel discussion during the conference. 'It has not eased. In fact, it's become deeper and longer than we anticipated.'
Shares of Jinko Solar, the world's top solar panel maker in terms of shipment volume, have declined by nearly 30 per cent in New York this year, bringing the slump to more than 60 per cent from a peak in 2022. Rivals like JA Solar, Tongwei, Trina Solar, Longi, and GCL have slumped by as much as 80 per cent since 2022.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
an hour ago
- South China Morning Post
Central banks rush to gold as fears of US dollar crisis mount
Why are central banks, including those of China and India, adding gold bullion to their reserves at an almost alarming rate, to the point where gold is now second only to the US dollar as an official reserve asset? It is not for the same reason that others are snatching up the yellow metal, which is to act as a hedge against inflation or stagflation. Central banks have instead joined the gold rush because they fear financial crises occurring, simultaneously and on multiple fronts, and these institutions constitute the first line of defence in dealing with such contingencies. But why gold? Because a crisis of the world's chief reserve asset – the US dollar itself – could be in the offing. Gold has overtaken the euro as the world's second-most-important reserve asset for central banks, driven by record purchases and soaring prices, according to a European Central Bank report published this month. Bullion accounted for 20 per cent of global official reserves last year, outstripping the euro's 16 per cent. Central bank gold holdings are now back to where they were in the 1960s, before gold went out of official fashion. This is no ordinary diversification of central bank reserves. It more closely resembles panic buying – not so much financial funk on the part of central banks as a scramble to stay ahead of anticipated crises in the financial system. It is difficult to fight fire with fire, and so in a situation that could include a bonfire of paper currencies led by the US dollar, only precious metals such as gold could serve as instruments to help douse the blaze. Unlike paper currencies, precious metals do not burn up when the heat is on in financial markets.
South China Morning Post
an hour ago
- South China Morning Post
Why is China building AI centres on the roof of the world?
Yajiang-1, a cutting-edge computing centre perched in the cradle of Tibetan civilisation along the roaring Yarlung Tsangbo River, is up and running as part of China's plan to transform the so-called roof of the world into a strategic frontier for sustainable supercomputing. The facility, the first major hub of the ' Eastern Data, Western Computing ' project on the Tibetan Plateau, takes advantage of the region's extreme environment to make massive artificial intelligence (AI) training tasks – amounting to millions of processing hours a year – radically more energy efficient. China plans to harness the natural cold, abundant solar power and innovative waste heat recovery to build more AI centres like Yajiang-1, which sits at an altitude of 3,600 metres (11,800 feet). 10:41 How Hangzhou's 'Six Little Dragons' built a new Chinese tech hub How Hangzhou's 'Six Little Dragons' built a new Chinese tech hub Located in Shannan, a city in Tibet autonomous region, the centre's initial phase will deploy more than 256 advanced computing servers, delivering a total processing power of 2,000 petaflops – a measure of floating-point operations per second. The facility, which was jointly developed by Tibet Yarlung Zangbo Computing Technology Company and the local government, aims to pioneer high-altitude digital economies. 'Yajiang-1 will catalyse frontier innovation across AI training, autonomous driving, smart healthcare and plateau ecosystem monitoring,' said Han Shuangshuang, general manager of the computing firm, in an interview with Science and Technology Daily published on June 20. 'Multiple partnerships are already established to advance these fields,' he told the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology.
South China Morning Post
2 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong primary school offering international programme announces sudden closure
A private primary school that offers an international curriculum in Hong Kong has abruptly announced its closure at the end of July, leaving some parents anxious about whether they can get back their debenture worth around HK$200,000 (US$25,500) as promised. A check by the Post on Saturday found that the website of Think International School, founded in 2003, was no longer online. In an email to parents earlier this week seen by the Post, the private school on Boundary Street in Kowloon Tong said it would close down on July 31. It also conceded that it would not be able to pay back parents who were holding debentures in the near future. 'Since closing a school will involve a lot of unexpected expenses, we are not sure about the financial commitments involved in the coming months,' the email said. A parent who paid a HK$200,000 debenture, due to mature next Monday, was offered a cheque for HK$204,000 that would be available for collection on the day but could only be cashed on January 8 next year.
