Inventory: 2015 annual financial reports of leading listed inverter companies

The grid-connected inverter is a recognized core component in photovoltaic power generation, and its importance is well known. Compared with the attention paid to it, the proportion of the inverter in the total investment of the power station is very small. If calculated according to large ground power stations, it only accounts for about 3%, and its proportion in distributed power stations will not exceed 10%. Under such circumstances, the market's desire for inverter price reduction is still strong, which also determines that the inverter market dispute is no less than that of the component market. Various market propaganda, price wars, industry rankings and verbal disputes are everywhere. Today, the editor will take stock of the mainstream inverter manufacturers through the objective data of the 2015 annual reports of some related leading listed companies.

Centralized inverter

The editor selected Sungrow Power Supply, Easy Power and Kstar (Kehua Hengsheng’s annual report had not been announced as of the time of writing this article) listed on the A-share market and made an inventory.

Sungrow still ranks first, far ahead, and has a clear advantage. In the context of increasingly fierce competition in the centralized inverter market, its gross profit margin remains stable at over 30%, and its sales have increased significantly year-on-year. Its sales in 2015 were about 800 million yuan (note: including string inverter sales), up 30.05% year-on-year; gross profit margin was 31.43%, down 2.89% year-on-year.

KSTAR's annual sales volume of photovoltaic inverters was 960.69MW, up 7.66% year-on-year; sales revenue was about 231 million yuan, down 23.04% year-on-year; gross profit margin was 29.7%, down 4.39% year-on-year. It is worth mentioning that its inventory volume has increased significantly. The report stated that the company received a large number of orders in the fourth quarter, which had been produced but not yet delivered.

YST's annual sales volume of photovoltaic inverters was 626.91MW, down 20.87% year-on-year; sales revenue was approximately RMB 201 million, down 32.44% year-on-year; gross profit margin was 26.9%, up 1.04% year-on-year. In its annual report, it mentioned that the decline in inverter production was mainly due to the fierce competition in the domestic photovoltaic market.

String Inverter

In 2015, Jinlong Technology had sales of approximately RMB 177 million and a net profit of approximately RMB 20.05 million, making it the leading company with the best performance among the currently listed string inverter manufacturers.

GoodWe's sales in 2015 were approximately RMB 161 million, and its net profit was approximately RMB 8.7 million. It is worth mentioning that its debt-to-asset ratio dropped sharply from nearly 79% in 2014 to approximately 61%, and its ability to resist risks has been significantly enhanced.

In general, the scale of string inverter enterprises is relatively small compared with that of centralized inverter manufacturers, but its growth is very rapid. It is also predicted that the market share of string inverters will grow rapidly in the future with the development of the distributed photovoltaic market. In terms of overall gross profit margin, string inverters are 5-10% higher than centralized inverters. This is mainly because string inverters are still mainly exported. With the increase in the proportion of string inverters in domestic applications and the increase in the application rate of large ground power stations, the gross profit margin is expected to drop to a level similar to that of centralized inverters.