First Solar Inc Company Profile

First Solar, Inc. manufactures solar modules with an advanced thin film semiconductor technology and provides comprehensive PV solutions that significantly reduce solar electricity costs. By enabling clean, renewable electricity at competitive prices, First Solar provides an economic and environmentally responsible alternative to existing peaking fossil-fuel electric generation. First Solar PV power plants operate with no water, air emissions or waste stream. First Solar set the benchmark for environmentally responsible product life cycle management by introducing the industry’s first comprehensive collection and recycling program for solar modules. From raw material sourcing through end-of-life collection and recycling, First Solar is focused on creating cost-effective renewable energy solutions that protect and enhance the environment.

First Solar, Inc. manufactures solar modules on high-throughput production lines and perform all manufacturing steps ourselves in an automated, proprietary, continuous process. Our solar modules employ a thin layer of cadmium telluride semiconductor material to convert sunlight into electricity. In less than three hours, we transform a 2ft × 4ft (60cm × 120cm) sheet of glass into a complete solar module, using approximately 1% of the semiconductor material used by other manufacturers to produce crystalline silicon solar modules. Our manufacturing process eliminates the multiple supply chain operators and expensive and time consuming batch processing steps that are used to produce a crystalline silicon solar module.

Our solar module is a single-junction polycrystalline thin film structure that uses cadmium telluride as the absorption layer and cadmium sulfide as the window layer. Cadmium telluride has absorption properties that are highly matched to the solar spectrum and has the potential to deliver competitive conversion efficiencies with approximately 1% of the semiconductor material used by traditional crystalline silicon solar modules. Our thin film technology also has relatively high energy performance in low light and high temperature environments compared with traditional crystalline silicon solar modules.

Customers

We have Long Term Supply Contracts with sixteen principal customers for the sale of solar modules. These customers include solar power system project developers, system integrators and operators of renewable energy projects that are headquartered throughout the European Union and the United States.

Our customers typically develop, own and operate solar power plants or sell turnkey solar power plants to end-users that include owners of land, owners of agricultural buildings, owners of commercial warehouses, offices and industrial buildings, public agencies, municipal government authorities, utility companies and financial investors that desire to own large scale solar power plant projects.

Raw Materials

Our manufacturing process uses approximately 20 types of raw materials and components to construct a complete solar module. Of these raw materials and components, the following nine are critical to our manufacturing process: TCO coated front glass, cadmium sulfide, cadmium telluride, photo resist, laminate, tempered back glass, cord plate/cord plate cap, lead wire (UL and TÜV) and solar connectors. Before we use these materials and components in our manufacturing process, a supplier must undergo a qualification process that can last up to 12 months, depending on the type of raw material or component. Although we continually evaluate new suppliers and currently are qualifying several new suppliers, a few of our critical materials or components are sole sourced and most others are supplied by a limited number of suppliers. One critical raw material in our production process is cadmium telluride.

Competition

The solar energy and renewable energy industries are both highly competitive and continually evolving as participants strive to distinguish themselves within their markets and compete within the larger electric power industry. Within the renewable energy industry, we compete with other renewable energy technologies including hydro, wind, geothermal, bio-mass and tidal. Within the solar energy industry, we believe that our main sources of competition are crystalline silicon solar module manufacturers, other thin film solar module manufacturers and companies developing solar thermal and concentrated photovoltaic technologies. Among photovoltaic module and cell manufacturers, the principal methods of competition are price per watt, production capacity, conversion efficiency and reliability.