Wednesday, October 17, 2012

What Will Happen to the Excess Capacity in Photovoltaic Solar? ($STP)

A Greentech Media article on PV solar fundamentals:

A combination of overly aggressive capacity build-up in 2010 and 2011, along with severely curtailed subsidies in major feed-in tariff markets resulted in a massive supply-demand imbalance that manifested itself in early 2011, and is not expected to abate until at least 2014.
They predict that "Select Struggling Pure-Play Chinese Firms Will Receive Additional Debt From Domestic Lenders".

The Chinese PV solar firm Suntech Power ($STP) has a market capitalization of $157 million. However, its bonds due March 15, 2013 currently trade at around 50 cents (a yield to maturity of over 200 percent).

Two possibilities: those bonds are paid at maturity or not. Paying them would probably involve some debt/equity swaps, or maybe refinancing them with new convertible debt with a very low conversion price (dilutive either way). If they don't get paid, the recovery value is probably zero and the stock is also a zero.

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