The average poly-silicon price has risen up owing to Chinese poly-silicon makers. Because of the expiration of the trade handbooks of their Chinese customers, a number of non-Chinese poly-silicon makers are seeing their sales to China being challenged by Chinese suppliers who now benefit from more price competitiveness. Chinese poly-silicon makers now have the leverage to pull up their selling price quotations within China, while non-Chinese suppliers have to adjust to the levy of import duties and AD & CVD charges on their products. Unfortunately, the willingness of poly-silicon buyers to accept the surge in price is not high, thereby limiting the price increase. On the other hand, the poly-silicon demand outside China is entirely different, with continuing downward pressure on suppliers. Therefore, the price outside China continues to drop slightly this week, balancing the price improvement observed in China. To sum up, the moderate increase of the overall poly-silicon price this week is mainly driven by Chinese players on their home market, and felt unevenly across markets and suppliers.

Overall module price only drops marginally this week as major Chinese players are still doing price competition in the emerging countries and global demand continues to slowly recover. This slight decrease in module price is majorly due to the price competition initiated by some top-tier Chinese module manufacturers in the emerging countries, notably in South Asia and Southeast Asia. With the blooming of solar system projects in those regions, Chinese module makers are keen to increase their market share using an aggressive pricing strategy. Aside from that development, the rest of the global markets show stable growth in demand, and flat prices this week for both multi-crystalline and mono-crystalline modules. Consequently, overall module price declines this week, but only marginally.

The price improvement of multi-crystalline cell has continued this week. However, although cell production utilization rates have increased, the demand momentum is not forceful enough to pull up the price more considerably because of limited downstream demand improvement. The cell demand is mainly contributed by the Chinese domestic market, which is growing but only at a relatively stable pace. As a result, driven by the Chinese domestic demand, the global cell price is improving, but only timidly, this week.

Because the downstream demand recovery is not strong enough, most of the multi-crystalline wafer producers have successfully ramped up their production utilization rates but can only maintain the same price quotes as last week. A small number of multi-crystalline wafer producers are able to pull up their selling prices, so the average multi-crystalline wafer selling price is slightly increasing this week. On the other hand, the lack of recovery in downstream demand for mono-crystalline products has frozen the selling price of mono-crystalline at the current level. In sum, under this wave of solar PV demand improvement, mono-crystalline wafer price has stopped from falling, while multi-crystalline wafer price has picked up moderately marginally.