Chinese solar panel manufacturer JinkoSolar had a huge year in 2019 and appears very confident about its prospects in 2020, even given the impact of the coronavirus COVID-19.
Late last week, JinkoSolar announced its unaudited financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2019. The company says it saw record highs for shipments, revenue and gross profit for both the final quarter last year and the full year.
Total solar module shipments for 2019 totaled 14.3 GW, which was within JinkoSolar’s updated guidance range of 14.3 GW to 14.4 GW and represented a jump of 25.6% from 11.4 GW across 2018. JinkoSolar panel shipments put the company at the top of the leaderboard of GlobalData’s top ten list of solar panel manufacturers for global shipments last year.
2020 – What About The Coronavirus Impact?
2020 has been and will continue to be an entirely different beast for just about everyone – but JinkoSolar remains upbeat.
It said the COVID-19 outbreak isn’t expected to have any material adverse impact on its operations looking ahead and is sticking by its full year 2020 shipment guidance and capacity expansion plans.
“Our supply chain and logistics were temporarily affected by the outbreak early in the first quarter of 2020 but has improved significantly,” stated JinkoSolar CEO Kangping Chen.
Mr. Chen said the company’s capacity utilisation rate has already recovered to 100%. But there has been some impact over the last few months – around 400 MW to 500MW of panel shipments earmarked for the first quarter will be postponed to Q2.
As mentioned here on SQ back in February (and not in relation to JinkoSolar specifically), even with production starting to return to normal in China during March, the situation regarding Chinese solar component supply wasn’t expected to be back to normal in Australia until early April.
For 2020, JinkoSolar estimates total solar module shipments to be in the range of 18 GW to 20 GW, a significant increase on 2019. It also expects its annual mono wafer, solar cell and solar module production capacity to reach 19.0 GW (18GW by April), 11.0 GW (including 900 MW N-type cells) and 25.0 GW respectively by the time the year is done.
As at the end of last year, the company’s mono wafer, solar cell and solar module production capacity was 11.5 GW, 10.6 GW (9.8 GW PERC cells and 800 MW N type cells) and 16 GW respectively.
