Singulus pins hopes on big CIGS orders after disappointing Q1

Share

Singulus Technologies, the German solar PV equipment manufacturer that underwent a restructuring process earlier this year, has posted anemic first quarter (Q1) sales figures for 2016.

The company registered Q1 sales of €12.8 million ($14.36 million) which, albeit slightly higher year-over-year than Q1 2015 (€12.6 million), masked a weak order intake and negative earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT).

For the quarter, EBIT was €-5.8 million (Q1 2015: €-5.9 million) and order intake was a mere €10.4 million. In Q1 2015, order intake stood at €62.8 million, buoyed at the time by major orders for Singulus’ vacuum coating machines and SILEX II type process machines.

Further, the firm’s order backlog this year was comparatively barren, amounting to €22.9 million, compared to €64.2 million last year.

However, Singulus is confident that orders for its CIGS thin-film production tools – currently undergoing extensive negotiations and thus ineligible for inclusion in Q1’s figures – can be concluded soon, with “associated sales” from these discussions realized in the current business year, the company’s financial report said.

In February it was reported that a 300 MW CIGS equipment order had been placed for Singulus’ Cisaris selenization production tool by an unnamed solar manufacturer, although discussions are thought to still be at the negotiating stage.

That same month the company announced that its bondholders had approved a proposed debt-equity swap: a restructuring process that enabled Singulus to continue its operations. In its financial report, Singulus confirmed that the restructuring had generated a capital increase of €5.76 million via the issuance of 5,760,000 new bearer shares valued at €1 each.

For the current business year the company expects to generate sales in the range of €115 to €130 million, which would be an improvement on 2015. However, despite this projected increase, Singulus still expects a negative EBIT for the year, somewhere in the range of €-2 to €-6 million.

Popular content

This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.

Share

Related content

Elsewhere on pv magazine...

Leave a Reply

Please be mindful of our community standards.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.

Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.

You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.

Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.