This week, the focus of the market was on the change of the mono-si supply chain. Due to the rapid decline of mono-si price, the demand of this week has improved, and some PV cell manufacturers can finally stop inventory accumulation. Yet, because mono-si wafer’s supply was sufficient, its inventory has become full.
Polysilicon
Because of the increase of China’s antidumping duties for the polysilicon suppliers in Korea and the continuous downstream orders, the supply of polysilicon was still tight, and the entire price slightly increased. The polysilicon price for mono-si remained at RMB 152-157/kg, and the polysilicon price for multi-si was RMB 146-152/kg.
Si-wafer
Although the downstream demand for mono-si wafer was weak, some manufacturers eased the pressure of lowering price by digesting inventory on their own, making si-wafer price this week become stable. However, the small manufacturers who were unable to digest on their own still had to lower their prices.
As the inventory of PV cell manufacturers started to decrease, mono-si wafer price can have chance to remain stable. Though the decline of mono-si PV cell price increased the price–performance ratio of mono-si products, owing to the unbalance of the entire supply and demand, the price trend of mono-si in the short-term still became weak. Under the circumstances, because of the well condition of the first-tier manufacturers, the orders of multi-si wafer have been extended to January, and the price remained steady.
PV cell
The end market started to purchase mono-si products. Besides, more PV cell manufacturers lowered the percentage of mono-si PV cell production line. The speed of accumulating inventory for mono-si PV cell has become slow. This week, the mainstream mono-si PV cell price was RMB 1.68-1.7/W, which was almost close to diamond wire saw multi-si PV cell price. After a week, the spread increased the willingness of purchasing mono-si products in the market. Like si-wafer sector, although the normal mono-si PV cell price can stop from decreasing, the trend was still weak. However, because the availability and supply for mono-si PV cell production line declined, the unbalance between supply and demand can be improved quickly.
Module
The demand for December mainly came from Chinese subsidy program, the year-end sales of distributed system and the demand before the start of section 201 petition. In addition, because of the seasonal demand in 1Q18 for India and Japan, the orders became higher in December. Although the main demand focused on multi-si, with the participation of Japanese market and the change from multi-si to mono-si for the demand of few Chinese distributed systems, the demand of mono-si started to be improved.
