Asbeck says he continues to see his company in a competitive position. "Of course, we have cost disadvantages compared with Asian manufacturers. However, we make up for that with the greater efficiency of our products and a higher sales price," Asbeck told "Der Aktionär" in an interview.
The company aims to compensate for the drop in demand in Germany in recent months with increased sales abroad. The share of PV products that it manufactures and sells abroad is currently 60 percent: this is expected to climb to 75 percent within the next two years, according to Asbeck.
He cites an additional 30 percent increase in terms of "quantitative" growth as a target for the current financial year. "How this will pan out in terms of sales naturally depends on the development of prices. But sales should increase nevertheless," remarked the chairman of the board.
Asbeck still expects to see consolidation of the market. He regards it as extremely important that PV companies invest in new technology generations. "Companies that do not keep up with this growth pace will be the victims of consolidation."
Asbeck goes on to say that he does not believe that there will be a ceiling on new PV installations in Germany. "That is not appropriate in the least and it would also be stupid," he said in the interview. He stresses that in light of the deep cuts in solar subsidies in the past and upcoming months, the big achievement of the PV industry is to lower costs. "Nevertheless, we succeeded in doing so in 2010 we are working on doing it again in 2011."
Solarparc hardly turns a profit
On Tuesday, Solarparc AG, which Solarworld wants to completely take over, announced its preliminary figures for the financial year 2010. The PV project planners were able to more than double sales to a total of 23.2 million. At the same time, however, the result after taxes according to information provided by Solarparc plummeted to just 21,000. This is in comparison to 2009, which achieved a figure of 3.5 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
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.