PV inverter revenue growth is only in the "single digit"

Although the global inverter market has grown significantly this year, price pressures are limiting growth in a market where competition is fierce, according to an IHS analyst.

Inverter shipments grew 35% year-on-year in the first nine months of this year, including “dramatic growth” in August and September, Cormac Gilligan, senior analyst for the research firm’s solar industry supply chain, told PV Tech yesterday. By October, when IHS completed its inverter customer survey, prices had fallen to $0.12 per watt.

"Unit growth is very strong, but pricing pressure is limiting revenue growth," Gilligan said. "It's still a very stable market in terms of revenue. So units are growing but revenue growth is in the single digits."

In its most recent PV Inverter Customer Insights Survey at the end of October, Gilligan’s team reported that an expected 20GW of inverter shipments in the fourth quarter of this year would imply year-over-year growth of 4%.

Despite Advanced Energy’s high-profile exit from the industry in June, Gilligan said that generally the number of suppliers serving the market remained the same as a year ago, including Swiss company SolarMax, which has resumed production and is now manufacturing in Germany.

Gilligan also said his team noted the growing prominence of Chinese inverter manufacturers, including Sungrow, Huawei and TBEA, and that Sungrow, along with other inverter manufacturers, is now also executing its own projects in some ways through an EPC arm, reflecting a recent trend of increased vertical integration among Chinese module suppliers.

Even in this fiercely competitive field, IHS analysts said efforts were underway to increase capacity, with two big companies in particular, Huawei of China and General Electric (GE) of the United States, seeing shipments rise sharply.

“The suppliers that are really increasing their production capacity now are Huawei and General Electric. Huawei is obviously a large Chinese company, building its own international business in Europe, and for them, the United States will be a key market for future development. General Electric has signed an agreement with NextEra Energy for 1GW projects from the last quarter of this year to 2016, and will be active in markets such as Japan and India (click to view PV-Tech’s previous related reports).”

“If you include these two industrial multinational mega-suppliers in a relatively crowded top market where shipments have increased significantly, it means there are now more suppliers competing at the U.S. utility scale, and European suppliers are really trying to increase capacity.”