LONGi’s BC bet moves from technology proof to market execution

For LONGi, back contact technology is no longer only a question of laboratory efficiency or technical ambition. It has become a strategic platform that the company believes can support its next phase of product differentiation, market expansion and long-term competitiveness.

That was the message from Jiang Dongyu and Tong Hongbo during a group interview with Chinese media at SNEC 2026 in Shanghai. Their comments showed a company trying to shift the discussion around BC technology from “whether it can be industrialized” to “how it can create value at scale.”

Tong said LONGi has completed the transition of BC technology from laboratory development to mass production over the past three years. In his view, the company has moved through the stages from zero to one, and then from one to one hundred. That means the central questions around BC are no longer limited to proof-of-concept. They now include yield, manufacturing scale, module power, cost structure, intellectual property and market application.

One of the most closely watched issues has been manufacturing yield. BC technology has existed in different forms for decades, but it remained difficult to commercialize because of high capital expenditure, complex processes and elevated manufacturing costs. Tong said LONGi has made major progress in cell production yield, with the cell yield now exceeding 98.5%, broadly comparable with other module technologies. He also said mass-production cell efficiency has broken through 27%, while half of module products will reach 670 W-680W level at Q4 of 2026. LONGi expects further improvement toward the 670 W to 680 W range, although detailed figures should still be checked against formal company disclosures.

The significance of these figures is not only technical. They support LONGi’s claim that BC has entered a scalable manufacturing phase. For a technology that has long been seen as efficient but difficult, this matters. It gives LONGi a stronger basis to argue that BC can serve real markets rather than remain a premium niche.

The company’s market strategy is built around two types of demand. In mature markets such as China and Europe, Jiang said customers are no longer focused only on price. In China’s commercial and industrial segments, for example, customers are paying more attention to high efficiency, safety and reliability. In Europe, the emphasis is even clearer on scenario-based differentiation, including aesthetics, full-black design, anti-glare requirements and other application-specific features.

In rapidly growing markets, the logic is different. Customers in emerging and high-growth regions often need large volumes of high-efficiency products for utility-scale, ground-mounted and C&I projects. Here, LONGi’s argument is that it has one of the largest high-efficiency BC production platforms and can therefore support both scale and performance.

This distinction is important because LONGi is trying to avoid defining BC only through cell efficiency. The company sees BC as a platform for scenario-based product design. Tong said LONGi is already developing products for desert environments, hail-prone regions, marine or salt-mist conditions, anti-glare applications and high-aesthetic distributed generation. This reflects a broader shift in the PV industry: modules are no longer treated as one-size-fits-all commodities, but as products that must respond to specific climates, installation environments and customer requirements.

The risk, of course, is that BC could follow the path of other technologies and become rapidly commoditized. More companies are now promoting BC products, and the technology is increasingly viewed as an industry direction. LONGi does not deny that others will follow. Jiang said this is natural once a difficult route has been proven. As an industry leader, he argued, LONGi has taken on the cost of exploring the “uncharted territory” of the technology.

But Jiang also said BC will not simply repeat the previous cycle in which a technology route was quickly copied and commoditized. The difference this time, he said, lies in intellectual property, first-mover capacity, higher conversion cost and the industry’s current financial constraints. LONGi began laying out BC-related research around 2017 and has since built a patent system covering structure, materials, equipment and manufacturing modules from wafers to cells and modules. Tong said as of the end of 2025, LONGi has more than 510 authorized BC-related patents, including more than 330 invention patents.

Jiang also emphasized the capital barrier. Existing TOPCon lines can be modified to some extent, but the reuse rate is limited and meaningful conversion still requires significant capex. In a market where many manufacturers are already under financial pressure and supply exceeds demand, large-scale technology conversion is more difficult than in previous expansion cycles. Even after conversion, companies still need to find sufficient demand and earn a return on the new investment.

This is one reason LONGi believes it can maintain a lead of three to five years. That lead, however, will only matter if it translates into customer value. Jiang was careful to frame technology not as an internal achievement, but as something that must improve project returns. BC, he said, must answer a simple question: what does it bring to customers? The answer, in LONGi’s view, is higher efficiency, lower LCOE, stronger reliability and safer long-term operation over a 25- to 30-year asset life.

That long-term view also shapes LONGi’s position on cost reduction. Jiang pushed back against what he sees as an excessive focus on short-term watt cost. In a deeply loss-making industry cycle, he warned that some forms of cost reduction may come at the expense of quality and reliability. For a module designed to operate for decades, using today’s distressed supply-chain prices as the basis for long-term value assessment can be dangerous.

LONGi’s principle, he said, is “efficiency first, cost reduction second.” Cost reduction should come naturally from higher efficiency, better technology, improved manufacturing and materials innovation, not from pushing material tolerances to the edge or weakening long-term reliability. If a cost reduction cannot meet that standard, he said LONGi would rather not pursue it.

The company is also looking beyond today’s BC platform. Tong said LONGi continues to study perovskite tandem technology and others, although they remain in research or early-stage exploration. For now, however, the company’s most immediate focus is clear: scale BC, refine BC-based product scenarios, and use its silicon wafer, cell and module integration capability to keep improving performance.

LONGi’s message at SNEC 2026 was therefore both ambitious and pragmatic. BC is presented as the company’s long-term strategic route, but not as a simple efficiency slogan. Its success will depend on whether LONGi can convert technical leadership into bankable, reliable and differentiated products that customers are willing to pay for. In a market still under severe price pressure, that may be the real test of the BC era.