JinkoSolar makes big gains in lean solar market  

Chinese based JinkoSolar has posted its third successive quarter of profitability, cementing its position as the strongest solar manufacturer in the region and exceeding Wall Street projections for the company. Bucking an industry-wide two-year trend of losses due to oversupply, JinkoSolar shipped over 1.9GW of solar capacity and posted revenue of US$1.17 billion for the 2013 financial year.

The company’s strong position in a turbulent market saw it acquiring a number of smaller competitors and reorganised distressed manufacturing processes. Jinko was brought in by bankruptcy administrators to assist in the dissolving of Topoint’s manufacuring plants, leasing their plants while the restructure took shape. Following the acquisition Jinko added 100 megawatts to its impressive 2 gigawatt solar panel manufacturing capacity.

With revenue increasing 47% over the previous year, JinkoSolar CEO Kangping Chen claims the achievement was mainly reached by cutting operational costs (tumbling a massive 63%) and improving gross margins. The company has also developed business in emerging markets including Asia and the US as demand in the Western European markets slow.

“Having recorded our third straight quarter of profitability, I am proud to report another strong performance as we continue to expand our manufacturing and downstream businesses,” Chen stated.

JinkoSolar stocks closed at $30.72 on the New York Stock Exchange, falling slightly despite the company’s strong financial standing. Despite a 10% fall in stock price over the last month it is still a highly rated investment.

Last week at the PV Expo in Japan the company announced JinkoSolar Smart Modules, embedded cell optimizer ICs that allow under performing solar cells to continue contributing power without reducing the output of the rest of the string. It is expected that this could improve module yield by up to 20% while also preventing hot spots, the most common cause of module failure.

JinkoSolar builds on their strong Australian prescense having recently supplied 319,000 panels to solar farms in Cape Town and Canberra removing the equivalent of 198,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.