ReneSola reports ‘most profitable quarter’ and upgrades year’s financial outlook

Solar developer ReneSolar Power nearly doubled its gross profit in Q2 2021 compared with Q1 and has improved its business forecast for the remainder of the year after this quarter’s results exceeded analyst expectations.
On Monday (30 August), the company reported its unaudited financial results for the quarter ending 30 June that showed gross profit was at US$11.3 million in Q2, up from US$6.8 million in Q1. This occurred even as revenue went down US$4.3 million compared with last quarter. Moreover, gross margin for Q2 was 61%, compared to 29.9% in Q1 2021 and 28.4% in Q2 2020.
As a result, ReneSola is raising its expectations for 2021 and now expects a gross margin of more than 30%, compared with the previous guidance of 25%. Revenue forecasts have not changed, however, and are expected to be within US$90-100 million.
“For the third quarter of 2021, we expect revenue to be in the range of US$19 to US$21 million and gross margin in the range of 36% to 40%,” ReneSola said in its Q2 Letter to Shareholders.
The letter lauded the company’s “most profitable quarter” since becoming a pure-play project developer in Q3 2017. It also marked its “fifth consecutive quarter of profitability, with the bottom line well ahead of expectations despite sequentially lower revenue due to the timing of a project sale”. This bottom-line growth was largely driven by high demand for projects in Europe and the US.
In May, PV Tech reported that ReneSola Power was aiming to build on solid first quarter financial results to reach a 2GW PV project pipeline by the end of 2021, as it prepared to enter at least two new European markets. And, in the same month, we covered its joint venture with Eiffel Investment Group to finance its European pipeline, which includes projects with a combined capacity of 340MW, with the JV used to bring up to 700MW online by 2024.
Most recently, ReneSola Power has formed a partnership with UK-based Emeren to co-develop ground-mounted solar projects in Italy.
By the end of June, ReneSola had a mid-to-late-stage solar pipeline of 1.6GW, with 170MW of capacity in operation and 15MW under construction in Poland and China.