Jan. 21, 2008 – Taiwan’s Motech Industries is buying a factory from state-run saltmaker Taiyen as part of an plan to aggressively increase output capacity, according to the Taiwan Economic News.

The planned facility in the Southern Taiwan Science Park would have 300MW capacity; a forthcoming similar site in mainland China would add another ~280MW of cells by the end of this year, a 140% increase in capacity from 2007 and moving Motech among the world’s top three solar cell makers, the paper notes. Motech saw sales nearly double in 2007 to $486M.

Taiyen is said to be “eager” to sell the “money-losing” facility, where it spends >$30M to produce organic photo conductor drums, used in laser printers, fax machines, and copiers; making the drums has yielded a $3.1M loss over the past four years, the paper notes.