Another Chinese Solar Manufacturing Star Rises After Longi

About Tongwei Group

Tongwei Group has become one of the fastest growing solar manufacturers in the world after it rapidly increased its capacity and shipments of solar cells last year. The company not only makes solar cells but also has got 20,000 tons of polysilicon capacity which is plans to further expand. The company is rapidly making use of new technologies in solar cell manufacturing to get high margins allowing it to increase its profits by almost 100% last year. The company which has a total cell capacity of 5.4 GW plans to build two 10 GW solar cell plants in China which will be highly automated and use the latest PERC and monocrystalline technologies.

Tongwei has a different strategy as compared to other large Chinese solar players as it plans to mainly focus on the solar cell which is where the real differentiation in efficiency comes about. The company plans to sell the solar cells to large module makers such as Jinko Solar and Canadian Solar which has got an extensive solar panel global sales and distribution network.

Tongwei like GCL plans to build factories using “Manufacturing 4.0” processes which means that it makes extensive use of robotics, machine learning, and AI while at the same time use the minimal number of human workers. Tongwei has carved out a major niche for itself in the solar manufacturing industry like Longi which has also created a new segment of low cost p-type monocrystalline solar panels. Both these companies are much more profitable than other players as they came to the industry late allowing them to use better and lower cost technologies to build scale.

The solar industry is set to change dramatically with the advent of new process and technologies. Also, most of the smaller players are set to be wiped out as they will not have the capital to build these large-scale giant solar plants with the latest technologies. Already the larger players are capturing more marketshare leaving the smaller companies in an unviable state. With these massive capacities coming online, the gap will only widen between the large players and the Tier 2 and Tier 3 companies.