Photovoltaic inverter industry survey analysis and development trends

The photovoltaic inverter market is still dominated by foreign companies. The change in recent years is that the market used to be dominated by professional companies (SMA, Power-one, KACO, etc.), but now multinational giants such as ABB, GE, Siemens, and Schneider have also joined, and companies are also working hard to penetrate the European and American markets. Therefore, the rapidly expanding production capacity in the industry has created great pressure on inverter prices.

According to the China Photovoltaic Inverter Industry Survey Analysis and Development Trend Forecast Report (2015-2020) released by market institutions, the global photovoltaic inverter output in 2014 was about 45.3GW, an increase of 11.3% over the same period of the previous year. In 2014, affected by the increase in new photovoltaic installations in China and other markets, the global demand for photovoltaic inverters reached 44GW, and the growth rate of global photovoltaic inverter demand was basically the same as the growth rate of production.

Statistics and forecasts of global photovoltaic inverter production and sales from 2013 to 2018: GW In 2014, global photovoltaic inverter product shipments reached 44GW, an increase of 11.5% over the same period in 2013. However, during the same period, product prices dropped from US$0.17/W to US$0.15/W, a decrease of 11.8% per unit. The price decline exceeded the growth in shipments, so the global photovoltaic inverter market size declined slightly in 2014.

At present, the domestic photovoltaic grid-connected inverter market is relatively small. There are many domestic inverter manufacturers, but there are not many inverter manufacturers specifically for photovoltaic power generation systems. However, many domestic companies have been researching the inverter industry for many years and have a certain scale and competitiveness, but there is still a large gap in inverter technology quality and scale with foreign companies. The field where domestic inverter manufacturers have more entrants is small and medium-power inverters, and their technology is at the same level as foreign manufacturers. At the same time, due to the rapid construction of production capacity and relatively low labor costs, domestic companies have obvious competitive advantages in small and medium-power inverters.