Solar ♦ news digest to XsunX.
First Solar financials shine year over year
The cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar cell manufacturer did however suffer due to the Topaz project
First Solar has announced financial results for the first quarter of 2013.
Net sales were $755 million in the quarter, a decrease of $320 million from the fourth quarter of 2012 and an increase of $258 million from the first quarter of 2012.
The firm says decrease in net sales from the fourth quarter of 2012 was primarily due to less revenue recognition from its systems business projects primarily related to the Topaz project.
The increase over the first quarter of 2012 was mainly due to higher sales volumes for third-party module sales and an increase in revenue from systems projects.
The company reported first quarter net income per fully diluted share of $0.66, compared to $1.74 in the fourth quarter of 2012 and a loss of $5.20 in the first quarter of 2012, which included $444 million in pre-tax restructuring charges and costs in excess of normal warranty.
The first quarter of 2013 was impacted by pre-tax restructuring charges of $2 million (reducing EPS by $0.03), compared to $25 million (reducing EPS by $0.30) in the fourth quarter of 2012.
In both cases the pre-tax charges related to previously announced restructuring actions.
The sequential decrease in earnings was primarily due to higher revenue recognition for Topaz in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Also, temporary construction delays at the AVSR project, and pre-planned lower manufacturing utilisation as the company accelerated efforts to upgrade production lines to enable the firm to achieve near term targets on its module cost and efficiency improvement roadmaps made an impact.
Cash and Marketable Securities at the end of the first quarter were approximately $1 billion, essentially unchanged compared to the end of the fourth quarter of 2012, and an increase of $262 million over the first quarter of 2012. Cash flows from operations were $66 million in the first quarter, compared to $328 million for
the fourth quarter of 2012.
The firm also maintained its full year 2013 financial guidance as issued during the 2013 Analyst Day event held April 9, 2013. Copies of the presentation materials for both the Analyst Day event and the first quarter 2013 earnings call are posted in the Investor section of its website at
www.firstsolar.com.
“We demonstrated progress on several fronts during the first quarter, including continued strengthening of our balance sheet and additions to our pipeline,” said Jim Hughes, CEO of First Solar. “We remain on track for the year and reaffirm our full-year 2013 financial guidance and are focused on achieving our goal of new bookings to shipments ratio of one-to-one.”
GaAs nanowires harvest solar power
A novel 3 dimensional geometry based on gallium arsenide enables trapping more light than planar structures, such as silicon solar devices, and with less material
How can we harvest the energy of the sun at a better quality and at a cheaper cost?
To find out, Anna Fontcuberta and her team in the STI Laboratory of Semiconductor Materials (LMSC) at EPFL are working on novel solutions to produce the solar cells of tomorrow.
The research of Fontcuberta, a professor in the STI LSMCL, focuses on new ways to engineer semiconducting structures, mainly with the use of nanotechnologies.
Semiconductors, thanks to their physical properties, have increased the functionality of many objects in our daily lives (microwave ovens, cars, DVD player or computers e.g.) and at the same time our quality of life.
The LSMC works on new geometries using nanowires. These are needle-like crystals of a diameter between 20 and 100 nm and several microns long.
The objective is to increase their functionality by understanding their properties and finding new ways to fabricate them. Among the many applications using nanowires is one of a higher interest to Fontcuberta and her team: solar cells.
Because of the world’s urgent need to harvest greener energies, nanowire solar cells have a huge societal and
June 2013
www.compoundsemiconductor.net 143
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