Real Estate crash in India Estate prices have kept moving upwards relentlessly even as other asset classes have languished. Corporate mis-governance and corruption has driven investors away from equity, while bond and fixed income investments have been less attractive because of high consumer inflation. This has made gold and real estate the preferred choice of […]

India’s Green Companies are seeing tremendous growth backed by the nation’s massive energy demand increase. However, it is a known fact that India’s power situation is abysmal, with both the supply and quality of electricity being quite pathetic in most parts of the country. India’s power generation companies are hampered by lack of land, fuel, […]

The US Import Sanctions on Chinese Solar Panel imports will become a non-event soon as Chinese solar panel producers are easily short circuting the sanctions. They are using a number of strategies to protect themselves from the upcoming duties and anti-dumping measures. This shows that globalization makes the use of specific duties on a nation quite useless and only benefits the lawyers . The reason is that private companies are much more faster and nimble compared to the slow moving bureaucrats .

India’s Real Estate Companies have seen a very tough 3-4 years with interest rates climbing, investors running away from shoddy accounting and the global macro scene being quite bad. One needs only to look at the stock price chart to see times have been very bad. Besides some of these companies have come under court scanner for their practises with Unitech CEO spending some months in jail for a telecom scam. However property prices have not come down as India’s real estate bubble seems immune from crises in the West and in India . Prices have more or less remained stable while other assets have seen a major carnage at one point or the other.

Germany has seen the biggest increase in solar installations in the history of solar energy with 3 GW in the month of December 2011 alone. For perspective this is almost equal to the installed capacity of the Chinese solar energy which has almost 6-7 times as much electricity generating capacity . The returns are still high in 2012 with existing FIT , so the German government may have to plan additional cuts with plans of

a) cut of 2% FIT every month in 2012 to slow down the installations and bring down the solar system IRR

b) a cap on feed in tariffs to solar systems of 3 kilowatts only .This will prevent larger solar installations and building of large solar farms

The USA and China are locked in a bitter tiff over solar panel imports from China. Note Solarworld filed a petition with the ITC which in all probability will put an anti-dumping duty on Chinese solar modules. Other countries whose solar panel producers have been swamped by the super cheap Solar Panel imports too are thinking of special custom duties. However the big Tier 1 Chinese solar panel makers are not sitting idle . They have already come out with strategies to circumvent the US Solar Panel Duties if they are imposed .