Cautious optimism for Roth & Rau after shaky H1

Share

Having reaped sales of €118.8 million in the first half (H1) of 2010, the German photovoltaic company’s performance declined to €92.8 million in H1 2011. Despite this, its gross performance increased from €149.6 million last year to €152.8 million.

"While the gross performance thus performed in line with expectations, a large share of the sales budgeted for the second quarter of 2011 could not yet be recognized as expected due to delays in the final acceptance of several projects," said Roth & Rau in a statement.

EBIT also suffered, having plummeted from a healthy €6 million in H1 2010 to €-24.4 million in H1 2011.

Roth & Rau says that H1 earnings were "further burdened" by one-off items totaling €12.6 million. These were caused by the discontinuation of the company’s turnkey business, expenses from its CRiSP cost and structure optimization program, and legal and advisory expenses from the Meyer Burger takeover. As such, adjusted EBIT amounted to €-11.7 million.

Orders on hand also fell, from the €351.1 million seen in H1 2010 to €244.3 million this year. Of this, new orders accounted for €111.4 million. Order cancellations, however, amounted to €110.8 million. Taking this into consideration, net new orders actually amounted to €616,000 in H1 2011, as opposed to €265.2 million in H1 2010.

Dietmar Roth, CEO of Roth & Rau AG explained, "The order situation has cooled off noticeably since June 2011. We expect the subdued demand for production equipment, particularly for use in the manufacture of crystalline silicon solar cells in our core markets, to continue in the coming months.

"New high-efficiency technologies are currently being developed in the field of cell production, a further reason for our customers’ current reluctance to invest. We therefore expect positive momentum from the market launch of our latest products in the fields of heterojunction technology and reverse side passivation scheduled for the second half of the year."

While the company believes its earning performance will improve in H2 2011, it remains cautious going forward.

"We have largely remedied the ‘teething problems' still witnessed by our SiNA 2 equipment in the first half. This means the delayed projects can be accepted in the near future. Recognizing these sales will generate substantial earnings contributions in the second half, thus partly making up for the losses incurred in the first half of the year," said Roth.

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.

Popular content

Hithium unveiles 6.25 MWh BESS, sodium-ion battery cell, installation-free home microgrid

13 December 2024 A trifecta of cutting-edge products debuted at Hithium’s second Eco Day event held in Beijing on Thursday.

Share

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.