Polysilicon contract price to increase, top tier manufacturers’ stance decisive

TAIWAN: According to EnergyTrend research, the current spot market price has ceased falling and stabilized – some products have even seen a price increase. In terms of January 2012 contract price, some upstream suppliers are planning for a slight increase.

However, negotiations are still underway, and EnergyTrend believes that the polysilicon contract price trend in 2012 will depend on the stance of downstream makers – wafer manufacturers in particular.Source: EnergyTrend, Taiwan.

This week’s wafer prices stayed flat. As for the market trend, high efficiency products and standard products currently show a price gap of around 10-20 percent. As the market proportion of high efficiency products continues to increase, spot price will be affected significantly. Additionally, most manufacturers have already cleared their inventories and thus have no desire to lower price further. As a result, this week’s prices remained stable, with slight signs of recovery.

Moreover, according to EnergyTrend, most downstream makers are relatively optimistic towards the market trend in 2011, believing the decreased demand in European markets will be limited while Chinese and Japanese markets will see obvious growth and mid-to-small manufacturers’ temporary production shutdown, all of which the industry believes will help stabilize polysilicon price.

In addition, China has proposed an appropriate policy to support the development of the polysilicon industry. Therefore, EnergyTrendd believes that Chinese government is ready to intervene with the market and companies lacking economies of scale and competitive advantages will likely be forced into mergers and acquisitions or driven out of business. With currently many western manufacturers temporarily shutting down part of capacity to alleviate pressure from decreasing polysilicon price, upstream manufacturers are already planning to increase contract price in 2012.

The Intersolar India exhibition that came to a conclusion last week without much of encouraging news. The market has seen prices lower than US$0.45/Watt for solar cell products from Indian manufacturers, but their quality and conversion efficiency need further confirmation. Although the quoted prices have not currently affected mainstream market price, India has enormous market potential and government policies to support the development of the solar cell and module industry. EnergyTrend believes that in the future Indian makers’ influence on mainstream spot and contract price is sure to gradually increase.

As for this week’s spot prices, polysilicon, Si wafer, and solar cell price all remain on a downtrend, but the decline has slowed. Lowest polysilicon price remained at $20/kg, while polysilicon ASP fell by 0.79 percent to $23.79/kg. As for Si wafers, lowest multi-Si wafer price was US$1.0/piece, while lowest mono-Si wafer price was $1.48/piece. This week’s multi-Si wafer ASP was $1.12/piece, an increase of 0.09 percent, and mono-Si wafer ASP remained the same at $1.570/piece.

Affected by the India market, this week’s solar cell price decreased further, with a low of $0.43/Watt and ASP at $0.505/Watt, a 1.17 percent decrease. This week’s module and thin film price remained the same.