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Technology Stocks : Semi Equipment Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (53523)	9/1/2011 3:28:32 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95520

I've concluded: It's easy to made solar panels, but hard to make them with high solar conversion efficiency, low manufacturing costs, in mass quantities. It's harder than it seems, to get into solar; barriers to entry are higher than a lot of companies thought. We are currently witnessing a wave of bankruptcies, venture capital being written off, and consolidations in solar. My assessment is that the reason we are witnessing a wave of bankruptcies etc (or maybe better, on the cusp of that wave) is that too many companies were chasing too small a market for now. Or maybe better again, because the solar market was too dependent on govt subsidies--especially from European countries--the banking and debt crisis there hit the sector especially hard. If Spain, Italy, Germany had not had financial crises hit them and had been able to maintain the subsidies as promised, the market would be far more robust. For now, the companies that will survive will have to cut their costs to the bone in order to be competitive at all. It will come, IMHO, but it will take some time. As Wal-Mart has discovered, solar and energy efficiency both make far more sense than some people have maintained, especially when the savings they generate are considered over a period of decades. And as solar costs do come down, they will make even more sense. You may be right in the end about those "barriers to entry," but I am guessing that even if you are, the leading solar companies will probably get bought out by rich energy or electronics companies when the market is a little more mature. On India, here is an excerpt from wiki: With about 300 clear, sunny days in a year, India's theoretical solar power reception, on only its land area, is about 5 Petawatt-hours per year (PWh/yr) (i.e. 5 trillion k Wh/yr or about 600 TW). [4] [5] The daily average solar energy incident over India varies from 4 to 7 kWh/m2 with about 1500–2000 sunshine hours per year (depending upon location), which is far more than current total energy consumption. For example, assuming the efficiency of PV modules were as low as 10%, this would still be a thousand times greater than the domestic electricity demand projected for 2015. [4] [6] en.wikipedia.org And here is an outline of their national plan for solar: en.wikipedia.org It is true that they don't have any solar companies listed on NYSE (as far as I know, anyway), but unlike China, they tend to begin building to meet internal demand, rather than for export. I wouldn't count them out--they have a huge population and they are, as the above paragraph suggests, almost ideally suited for solar. I think that their govt is serious about this, and, more important, I think it isn't just this govt, future govts will be behind it as well. They have a lot of coal, but not much oil and don't have the same vested interests fighting them as we do here in the US. that is just my opinion based on reading a few articles about them, not really based on any deep scholarly research on the country, so do your own DD on it. Also, I think Kyocera may also be a Tier 1 solar supplier. I may be wrong about that, they may not be large enough, but certainly I have seen their name bandied about nearly as much as Sharp. Or such, at least, is my admittedly dim impression, without bothering to look them up.