Announcing its preliminary full year PV module and cell shipments for 2017, JA Solar said performance had exceeded expectations, with up to 7.8 GW shipped.
In Q3 2017, it shipped 1.64 GW, while Q2 saw 2.39 GW, which was well above previous company guidance of 1.5 to 1.65 GW. At the time, JA Solar was the second module manufacturer to break the 2 GW barrier in quarterly shipments, a feat first achieved by JinkoSolar in Q1 2017. In Q1, meanwhile, it shipped 1.39 GW.
Last November, it said it expected to ship between 1.6 and 1.8 GW in Q4, the bulk of which were to go to external customers. However, based on today’s preliminary figures, it has reached between 2.1 and 2.4 GW of PV module and cell shipments in the last quarter of the year.
IHS Markit’s senior solar supply chain analyst, Jessica Jin, said last April that China’s Trina Solar and JA Solar, the country’s two largest cell suppliers, both saw major increases to their cell capacities in 2016, and were likely to overtake Korea’s Hanwha QCells to occupy the top two spots for global shipments by the end of 2017.
“JA and Trina put most of their cells in to their own modules,” said Jin. “They increased their module capacity previously, and are now planning to bring cell capacity in line with this. This is what will bring them ahead of Hanwha.”
Yesterday, Trina said it had shipped over 9 GW of solar PV products in 2017.
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