PVTIME – JA Solar announced its Q1 financials on the evening of April 28. According to the announcement, the company’s first-quarter revenue was 6.958 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 51.52%; net profit was 157 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 45.11%; and basic earnings per share were 0.0989 yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 53.57%.
JA Solar did not directly address the reasons for the decline in performance in the financial report. However, it is safe to assume that the price increase of silicon materials to be one of the driving factors.
During the reporting period, the company’s operating costs increased by 69.2% year-on-year to 6.2 billion yuan, which exceeded revenue growth by 18%. The company did directly correlate this to the expansion of sales and rising prices of raw and auxiliary materials.
As of the end of 2020, JA Solar’s module production capacity reached 23GW. According to the company’s progress report on projects under construction, the newly-built high-efficiency Qujing silicon wafer, Ningjin solar cell, and Yiwu Yangzhou and Vietnam module production facilities have all been successively put into production. It is expected that the company’s module production capacity will exceed 40GW by the end of 2021, and its silicon wafer and cell production capacity will continue to be maintained at about 80% of its module production capacity.
