After years of significant growth market condition, the solar industry is facing challenges in 2024.
Recently, various listed companies in the solar industry have successively released their annual reports for 2023 and first-quarter reports for 2024. Looking at the overall operating situation of these companies in 2023, leading companies in components, silicon wafers, battery cells, and inverters have performed well. Tongwei and Longi, two leading enterprises, both achieved over 15 billion USD in net profit attributable to shareholders, while JinkoSolar, JA Solar, Trina Solar, and Canadian Solar, among others, recorded net profits of over 7 billion USD.
However, starting from the fourth quarter of 2023, the situation changed. With the sharp decline in prices across the solar industry chain, leading component companies began to incur losses, with the largest losses reaching 4.05 billion USD in various sectors.
In the first quarter of 2024, the range of losses expanded further. For example:
2024 Q1 report of Longi(Top 1 solar panel brands)
| 2023 Net-Profit | $15.75 Billion |
| 2023 Q4 Net-Profit | $-1.39 Billion |
| 2024 Q1 Net-Profit | $-3.48 Billion |
| Year-on-Year decrease Rate | -164.61% |
Longi, one of the top 3 brands in solar panel, its net profit in the Q4 of 2023 is $-1.39BN fell rapidly to $-3.48 BN in the first quarter of 2024, 2times decreased in such a short period;
Even companies that did not incur losses saw a significant decline in net profit attributable to shareholders compared to the same period in previous years, with only three companies showing an increase year-on-year. In contrast, solar inverter companies performed slightly better, with no losses reported, but over 85% of solar companies experienced a significant decline in first-quarter net profit attributable to shareholders.
What’s next for solar industry 2024
According to ‘pv-magazine’, Germany awards 2.23 GW in PV tender, with lowest bid of €0.0362/kWh; In the last utility-scale PV tender, held in August 2023, the Bundesnetzagentur allocated 1.6 GW of PV at an average final price of €0.0647/kWh.
The hugely falling of cost compare to 2021 and 2022, over-capacity will be a big problem for solar companies, but solar industry will growthing inevitably, depending on the advantage of solar energy; Whereas, cheaper cost catalysts the process which strong the capacity to compete with Grid, people go solar will be exponential growth
