Sunny Times for Chinese Solar Power?
Lance on May 13 2007 at 3:55 am | Filed under: Environment, Investing, Lance's Page, Technology
To get rich is glorious in China nowadays. Scientists are no exception.
A top home-grown inventor, 41-year-old Ma Xin, is currently engineering a reverse takeover of a small Singapore-listed investment company, Rowsley, in a deal worth 2.7 billion Singapore dollars ($1.6 billion) that would bring a small part of his high-tech corporate empire, Sinocome Group, to the international capital markets.
Ma is conducting the takeover through an obscure solar panel production company called Perfect Field that he founded last year.
Outside of the attempt to tap into the international capital markets, why is this interesting?
Ma says the company will be a disruptive player in the energy field, with technology that is competitive with coal power — without any government subsidies.
[...]
Ma plans for Perfect Field to churn out photovoltaic solar cells based on amorphous silicon technology, a second-generation technique that requires only a thin film of silicon on a glass substrate, making it substantially cheaper to produce than the prevalent, thicker crystalline silicon technology.
Most Chinese solar panel companies, including industry leader Suntech Power, make crystalline silicon solar cells.
The rap on amorphous silicon has been that it is less efficient at collecting solar energy, requiring a larger surface area than crystalline panels. However, Ma claims that Perfect Field has raised the efficiency of its panels to near that of crystalline silicon.
Perfect Field plans to achieve a production capacity of 100 megawatts in 2007 and 500 MW by 2009.
Of course, the reverse takeover has some of Rowley’s current investors feeling jittery, they now own businesses in such exciting fields as paper recycling and ceramic tile manufacturing. Meanwhile, Perfect Field, unlike the rest of his empire, has a pretty slim resume:
[T]he offer has caused unease among some Singaporean investors. Perfect Field has not yet sold any solar panels — it hasn’t even finished building a factory. It’s booked a mere 28 million yuan in revenue ($3.6 million) for consultancy work.
So Ma has tried to demonstrate his confidence and allay their fears with a rather bold sweetener:
Ma is guaranteeing Rowsley investors $300 million a year in profits for the three fiscal years through June 30, 2010. If he does not deliver, he has agreed to forfeit the 92% stake in Rowsley he would receive under the deal.
I hope he is right, Ma has steered his company to a rather nice string of successes, including in more traditional solar technology. Solar Power competitive with coal would be a huge step forward.
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