Competition from Asia, Unavailable Capital for Funding Affecting US Market
by Jeff Dorsch
When SEMI decided to give the 3rd Annual SEMI North American PV Fab Managers Forum the title, “Sustaining Business in a Changing Environment,” they were uncannily accurate about the “changing” aspect. The photovoltaic industry is now in something of a trough, with module and wafer pricing significantly down in the last two years as solar cell manufacturing has largely shifted to China and other Asian countries.
Despite the gloom and doom, several speakers at Monday’s event managed to accentuate the positive. “Solar is here to stay,” said Nasreen Chopra, vice president of capital equipment at Alta Devices. “We still have a lot of pillars here in the U.S.” She did acknowledge that pre-IPO companies in the photovoltaic industry currently face “a valley of death,” she added, with few opportunities to go public in the near future.
Still, there are 100,000 American jobs associated with the solar industry, noted Chopra, who also serves as co-chair of the SEMI PV North America Advisory Committee.
Other speakers at the event decried the election year politicization of photovoltaics as Republican politicians take shots at the recent failure of Solyndra. Joe Berwind, managing partner of AEI Consulting, said Solyndra has become “… a political football, baseball and basketball.”
With the stock prices of publicly held solar companies down, “solar will be at a disadvantage in raising money for the next two years,” Berwind predicted.
Shez Bandukwala of KPMG Corporate Finance said solar stocks are down 40 percent to 50 percent since April 2011, and the market is suffering from investor fatigue. When it comes to privately held companies, “there is no investor appetite for funding these companies” unless they have previously raised money, he added.