Overall Module price performed a mild drop this week, as global demand is gradually recovering since late May. Multi-crystalline module price stands still in China, as the demand is improving slowly. In the US, solar demand is promisingly increasing, although some solar module suppliers are trying to raise price quotes accordingly.

Overall Module price performed a mild drop this week, as global demand is gradually recovering since late May. Multi-crystalline module price stands still in China, as the demand is improving slowly. In the US, solar demand is promisingly increasing, although some solar module suppliers are trying to raise price quotes accordingly. However, affected by the global price downtrend, solar price still keeps flat or slightly drop in the US. In the EU, the new investigation of AD and CVD against China, Taiwan, and Malaysia has ceased the price competition and help the price relatively stabilize. On the contrary, because the module demand in Japan remains weak, module suppliers are forced to engage in price competition on both multi-crystalline and high efficiency mono-crystalline products. Fortunately, the stable JPY against the USD releases part of solar panel price pressure. In the emerging markets, Chinese and Indian module manufacturers do not offer severe price reductions anymore. At this moment, solar demand recovery is mainly caused by utility-scale solar systems with multi-crystalline modules. On the other hand, the main demand of mono-crystalline module is the residential market in Japan and Europe, where the demand is still depressed. As a result, overall module price declines tenderly this week, and mono-crystalline module price falls more seriously than the multi one.

Following the downstream demand situation, multi-crystalline cell prices have another price improvement, and mono ones show another consecutive downtrend. Although multi-crystalline cell suppliers intend to pull up the price more, the downstream demand at the time being is not forceful enough to improve their price quotes. On the other hand, mono-crystalline cell demand seems to be quiet, so that solar cell makers are shifting their production to multi-crystalline cell from mono-crystalline cell. With the decreasing production on mono-crystalline cell, the price pressure turns more moderately. To conclude, the downstream demand recovery and production re-allocation help multi-crystalline cell price improvement marginally and mono ones downtrend more slightly.

Multi-crystalline wafer price keeps stable, and mono one sustains the downtrend this week. Along with the downstream demand, major multi-crystalline wafer producers have successfully ramped up their production utilization rates but fail on price. Moreover, wafer buyers have been building up their inventories in the beginning of June, so major suppliers are unable to follow up the increasing demand to raise multi-crystalline wafer price. On the other hand, as mentioned above, since the downstream mono-crystalline product demand is still slow, mono-crystalline wafer price is also stressful. However, major Chinese wafer makers think the further price reduction can not help demand recovery quickly so as to have the relatively stable price policy. Therefore, multi-crystalline and mono-crystalline wafer prices show the continuous stable and downtrend this week, respectively.

The poly-silicon price is still stressful solely owing to the price reduction of spot traders. Major poly-silicon suppliers are keen to defend their selling price above their cash cost, but spot traders tend to dump their inventories, especially outside China, because of the uncertainty of the incoming Chinese AD and CVD. Nonetheless, both poly-silicon producers and traders think that the price has nearly hit the bottom so as to offer the mild price reduction. Therefore, poly-silicon price descends slightly this week.