- FSLR will likely beat on revs and earns as they squeeze efficiency out of manufacturing

- I believe the earns and especially the guidance won’t be enough to keep traders and analysts happy, however.  This is based on the following:

Concensus ’08 expectations for revenue exceed company guidance by $20M or more, so the company has to raise rev guidance just to meet expectations.  They already raised guidance last quarter.   They have already sold out production, so I believe inability to raise revs significantly through new sales, combined with the increasing difficulty of squeezing efficiencies out as their operations mature, makes it difficult to increase revs until significant new orders show up.

According to my oversupply thesis, I expected the “bulge” of Spain module orders to be showing up last q or this q, so, assuming I should eat my own dogfood, this means I should expect the company to be at least reasonably cautious on going-forward orders on tomorrow’s call.  As you recall, during Spain’s transition to new tariff regime, new systems in 2008 need to be installed and in-service by this summer in order to qualify for the old subsidies.

I’ve heard no new news on subsidy increases (or even progress) in any of the markets: Spain, Germany, US, Italy.  Thus I don’t see incremental positive news on that front.

Wild cards include yield and material costs (tellurium, esp).  Don’t have handicaps on those.

I think given the risk of oversupply in 09 based on 08 capacity increases, the company will need to strike a cautious note on margins, and maintain the same tone of “We are well positioned for an oversupply phase” as everyone else is saying.

Finally, a couple analysts have come out cautious on tomorrow.  Broadpoint, in particular, recommended going to the sidelines due to high expectations.

So, there you have it.  Tomorrow I’ll see how good my dogfood is… Last quarter, of course, FSLR was up $50  before the open…  I’ve no other solar positions at the moment.

——-

Finally, please note that REC posted great earnings on large increases in polysilicon sales.  I believe this absolutely supports my contention that increased supplies of poly will be consumed on the spot in order to create more cells/modules regardless of demand.  This situation will go on until the industry begins to feel pain due to falling ASPs, which has not yet occurred to any meaningful degree.

Summary: We are upgrading shares of CSIQ to Outperform and initiating a
$27 price target following checks that internal cell ramp is proceeding on plan.
We also see the valuation discount to group as excessive.
• We are turning more positive on shares of CSIQ after the recent pullback in
share price and believe the valuation discount to peers is excessive in light
of improving fundamentals for the company. Specifically, we believe
in-house cell production is ramping on schedule and that fixed-price raw
material and module contracts provide better visibility to earnings model
than for many of its peers.
• We believe 4Q results will exceed expectations and that Street estimates
for 2008 will come up. Specifically, we believe CSIQ’s internal cell
production is tracking slightly ahead of mgmt’s guidance of ~9MW and that
cell purchases are at least consistent Q/Q, leading to shipment and
revenue upside. We have raised our non-GAAP EPS estimate to $0.22
from $0.21.
• For 2008, our model is only taking into account production from existing
capacity at the end of 2007, but CSIQ is more than doubling its cell
capacity mid-year. Any output from this expansion could provide upside to
estimates, but mgmt is being conservative with guidance as it has not yet
secured raw material for the expansion. We believe upcoming deals could
satisfy 100% of raw material needs for guided output and potentially lead to
volume upside.
• We believe uncertainty surrounding the industry pricing environment in
2H08 is minimized, as CSIQ has secured ~200MW of module sales at fixed
prices, or basically all guided output. We believe few other Chinese comps
have this visibility into the topline in the back half of the year.
• CSIQ shares are currently trading at under 11x 2008 EPS of $1.83 (up from
$1.74), while Chinese comps are trading at ~19x ’08 EPS. Although we
believe CSIQ deserves some discount to peers as further proof develops of
consistency of performance, we believe the current discount is excessive.
We see a 15x multiple as fair at this time, leading to our $27 price target, or
47% upside from current levels.

——————-

A key question for the oversupply thesis is timing in several aspects.  I have seen on several earnings calls and reports now the following theses expressed by analysts:

- oversupply and ASP issues are a 12-month away problem.

- 2008 revenue looks fine because contracts are in place ( heard on FSLR call and CSIQ upgrade above)

This is all fine, and Oppenheimer’s call on CSIQ may be brilliant (I’ve no posn in CSIQ): a growth stock trading at 11x ’08 eps, with decent liklihood of estimates rising, sounds like a good buy to me.  However, here are my two issues with CSIQ:

First, I think economically speaking, in the long term this stock goes to $0.00 (or buyout value).  (I know, what a doom’n'gloomer I am! )

All I mean by this, is that when cells and modules hit oversupply this company is not well-positioned long-term to remain viable.  Specifically, they don’t even make all their own cells, they still buy some (I don’t know the proportion).  They are small relative to peers. Their ’08 production of 200-ish MW will make them a bite-size target for an STP or YGE, either to knock out via pricing or just absorb when times are tough.  They have no distinctive technology.

Second, regarding ’08 specifically, more near-term, here’s the situation they could find themselves in as cell/panel supply demand hits balance:  Their ’08 production based on ’07 capacity is sold; fine.  Their production ramp by mid-year 08 costs money. Oppenheimer sees this as glass half-full with potential eps upside from new production; I ask who’s drinking the milk?  Who’s buying CSIQ’s panels from new ’08 capacity?  If trouble emerges there, then margins depress in 2H08 as ramp-up costs are not offset by new contracts at sufficiently high ASPs.  Further, by end of 08 investors will be fully focused on ’09 supply/demand.

——-

Is there “great” demand for panels at the moment?  I offer this factoid: solarbuzz has report on 1/28 about YGE getting a new contract with Iberdola for 11.6 MW.  Announced Jan 28, 2008.  When do deliveries begin?  January, 2008.  Right now, yesterday.  Clearly YGE at least has panel inventory just sitting around waiting for new contracts.  I know, everyone needs to maintain inventory. But, as an investor, I would like to see backlog sufficient that there are waiting times for delivery.  There aren’t.  So when CSIQ (and a bunch of other folks) ramp up all that new capacity this year, where are the couple of Gigawatts of new projects going to come from late this year to ensure orders can’t just be filled from inventory?

a) yes, it’s an issue. Price pressure would occur at the module level first and then get worked back to wafers as vendors attempted to gain price response back along the food chain.

b) They (MEMC) are somewhat protected because they have been negotiating 10yr take-or-pay contracts with customers.  That is, they’ll see revenue even if the customer cancels orders.  It’s not obvious how pricing works in those contracts, however.  Gareeb felt he was relying on these contracts to whether through the short-term implications of oversupply.

c) Longer term, the  lower prices would stimulate demand and excess capacity would be sopped up and everyone is happy again.

—————-

Let’s start with the latter.  There is a problem with a classical economics view of demand elasticity in the PV industry; namely, the fact that classical economics don’t apply.  Demand in PV is a function of available subsidies which rise and fall with economies and political support.  Once grid parity is attained we can start talking about demand elasticity, but we’re not there yet for several years.   Regarding their take-or-pay contracts, without knowing the details,  I believe this can be a pointer to who is left holding the bag.  If WFR is right, then it’s another indicator that mid-chain folks like JASO will be the ones initially squeezed (although I don’t know that JASO is a WFR customer).  I also don’t believe that WFR will maintain it’s margins based on contractually beating up its customers, there will be some negotiated give-and-take there.   Bottomline, however, is even when everyone’s prices drop, demand will still be determined by access to subsidies.  Spain, with new caps on subsidies of 1.2GW, will not see more than 1.2GW installed just because prices drop 50%.

Lehman came out with comments on SPWRs call saying, I believe, that even if prices (module, I think he meant) collapse by 50% that SPWR would be able to maintain 20% margins.  I think that’s simply insane.   In any industry which sees serious oversupply, prices drop to cash cost.  They just do. A year and a half ago, looking at the homebuilders, I could tell they had not hit bottom because the companies in the business were still reporting profits.  Declining profits, but still profits.  Bottoms in commodity businesses aren’t hit until some major participants are losing money.  Same thing in LCD panel business.  Bottoms occur when AUO and LPL are reporting losses.

In other words, SPWR through brand strength, tech, etc. would gain market share in 09 to maintain enough growth to use up their capacity.

I can just hear the execs at YGE, STP, and FSLR saying the exact same thing.

That’s the problem with oversupply that is merely pending, rather than actually present.  It’s easy to come up with a strategy to deal with it – you just plan to steal market share from the next guy to keep your lines running.  Eventually, the oversupply becomes a present issue and someone winds up without a chair to sit on.  I’m not saying it’s SPWR, but it will be someone.  I expect the guys like WFR and JASO to get hurt first because they have less ability to compress margins.

The wildcard would be whether there is enough growth in demand to keep everyone happy.

So far, today, my short positions are getting trounced so apparently 2010 demand is looking just fine

I’ve previously posted on oversupply as a likely issue this year for solar stocks, and here’s SPWR’s results relate to that:  the company stated “In the latter part of 2008 and beyond, we expect our industry’s silicon feedstock to become more abundant, leading to lower solar panel prices which will redistribute the power and profit pools in the value chain”.  This statement illustrates the beginning of where PV is heading: Increasing poly supplies will lead to increased cell production. Prices at the level of poly, cells, and panels will start to decrease.  Margins at these levels will begin to compress.  Within a year, the entire industry at all levels will move into oversupply (see my previous post on this topic) and margins throughout the food chain will compress.

Sunpower is somewhat buffered from upcoming panel price declines because they are vertically integrated.  My personal take on Sunpower’s results is to apply them to a non-integrated company like JA Solar.  JASO buys poly and wafers and produces cells to sell to panel manufacturers.  As prices at the panel level start dropping, integrated suppliers like Sunpower will have greater ability to drop prices.  Because of oversupply at the panel level, the vertically integrated suppliers will be able to provide a greater portion of the industry’s needs and will capture this share because of their pricing ability.  The standalone panel manufacturers, who are frequently smaller companies, will be increasingly squeezed out, and non-integrated cell suppliers like JASO will get squeezed with them.  The fact that JASO is planning large capacity increases this year will only make matters worse for them. 

I will be listening on the Sunpower call for clues about supply and demand in 2H08 and beyond and their view of whether worldwide solar incentives can be expected to increase significantly.  If demand is, for whatever reason, increasing massively despite the stagnant-to-declining incentives picture, then my oversupply thesis could be wrong.  So far, it’s right on track.

Sunpower is one of the strongest and best-positioned companies in the industry, so this weak response to its outlook does not bode well for the remaining companies still to report.

Disclosure: I’m short SPWR, JASO, and FSLR

Ditto for ethanol; VSE has been pounded down 13 of the last 16 days for a 40% decline in 3 weeks. It’s now at levels last seen at $1.55 ethanol. Can’t last. CEO may have been wrong calling the top in corn after 3Q earns, but all that corn he saw is still out there. I don’t see $5 corn holding near-term.

Unrelated to altenergy trading, I think the ag stocks are due for a pullback.  Infact, they ARE pulling back.

Update: Wow, that was a short viewpoint. Sold off my new longs, going back to short. No strength here. What changed my view, in the course of a morning, was the Fed Philly index confirming recession outlook with (yet more) firmly negative data. Also, Credit Suisse came out with downgrade of Sunpower which pretty much cited my oversupply thesis exactly. If you recall, one of my earlier points was that solar momentum could last because analysts weren’t picking up on the oversupply issue. I believe that is already changing.

These stocks could have much farther to go down. For example, the CS analyst cut his target for SPWR from 165 to 77. Wow. Project that to the rest of the industry…

MUMBAI (Thomson Financial) – Fitch Ratings said it has placed California’s about 43 bln usd outstanding general obligation (GO) and 5.9 bln usd in related state appropriation-backed bonds on negative watch, citing California’s widening structural budget and cash flow imbalances as the state’s economy slows largely due to the housing downturn.

The ratings agency currently rates California’s general obligation bonds ‘A+’.

Risks are heightened given the long-term lack of political consensus for fiscal solutions to California’s chronic structural budget imbalances, and concerns regarding state economic and revenue forecasts developed in early December, since which time the general economic outlook has diminished, Fitch said. …

Schwarzeneggar has already warned that the budget is in trouble.  The implications for solar incentives is obvious but whether they are cut, maintained, or extended depends on PV’s political strength.  However, if the situation comes down to layoffs, tax increases, maintaining essential services, etc., then political strength won’t help an expendable program.  PV subsidies in California don’t even have legislation behind them.

The second effect, in California and Spain at least, is exhaustion of subsidy program capacity.  I don’t have the numbers offhand, but the general point is that PV subsidies have allocation levels that consumed as projects come on line.  In sunny times one might expect that great demand for PV installations would lead to extensions of the programs.  These, however, are not such times…

I believe that the economic situation in Europe is decaying as it is here in the US, though not as rapidly.  I expect to see a status quo of maintaining PV subsidies, at best, in worsening times.

I’ve already seen a comment on the fairly influential blog, calculatedrisk.blogspot.com, that the US should eliminate ethanol subsidies first to save money and second to lower corn prices.  In fact, neither goal would likely be attained by doing this, but subsidies are starting to look like targets nonetheless.

At the moment, however, my trading stance is that I’m short ADM and sidelined on VSE.  The reasons are because of momentum and earnings.  ADM has runup because it’s an ag stock, and ag is hot, and that’s that.  Fine.  Lots of reasons to own the stock.  However, as western civilization continues crumbling about us, momentum stocks are subject to sudden reversals (as solar showed this morn).  The other issue is corn.  Corn is at $4.65 a bushel this morning, which is astronomically high in historical terms.  Commodity traders advise that we’re in a bull and we should just get used to.  ADM’s main business, corn syrup processing, takes a hit as corn goes up.  I don’t know the numbers offhand, it was something like .02 hit in eps per dime on corn or somesuch.  ADM is a hedging master so I don’t know that they’ll take a significant hit.  But it’s enough to make think about fading the momentum here.

VSE has a similar issue.  On their 3Q earnings call, the CEO made two significant statements.  First, all their new ethanol contracts would be spot-indexed, since they didn’t intend to lock-in the low-ball prices at the time in a long-term contract.  That’s great; ethanol has moved up from $1.60 in Oct to $2.30 recently ($2.18 today) and their 4Q revenue should get a lift.  However, he also said that, as of the end of 3Q, that they were not hedging their corn exposure at all, because, being smart experienced guys, they knew that the bumper crop coming in would cause corn prices to fall (from around $3.90 then).   So they’ve gained on ethanol, lost on corn, I haven’t bothered to try to calculate what happened to their crush spread because it won’t matter.  On their 4Q call, whatever the numbers, some analyst will point out that they screwed up on corn hedging.   And the stock will (hopefully) take a hit.  My long bias will probably tell me to enter a long trade then.

I think over the course of 2008, oil and gas will support ethanol, corn will drop assuming a recession drives some speculation out of commodities, and VSE will have positive catalysts: turning up plants, increasingly better voluntary blend numbers, a potential export program in 2008, possibly another acquisition, and likely positive news on their cellulosic JV.

- First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) initiated at Merrill Lynch with Buy and $300 tgt
- Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ:ESLR) tgt upped to $30 at Think Equity

Apparently everyone decided to sell the news and the recent runup.  I don’t think it’s quite the beginning of the end for solar stocks just yet; but it doesn’t help the bull case, either.  I’m desperately trying not to jump into too many shorts just yet, because I know there’s still lots of support in the analyst community.  The ESLR report, for example, still showed where analyst focus is: ESLR is worth 30 because they secured their supply through 2010.  No one cares about demand yet.  People like the Fast Money crowd (najarian) are still touting the stocks, Cramer is still hot FSLR, etc., so it’s important not to short into the intact uptrend.  I’m just predicting the uptrend ends as overcapacity becomes recognized as a pending issue; this won’t show up till a few companies start owning up to ASP and margin pressure.

On the issue of “nominal” versus actual capacity, I certainly assume my source data (PRs, websites) is providing nominal data and that actual capacity is lower.  How much lower? Jacob R. provided a useful data point  that Q-cells sees actual capacity at 25% less than nominal.  I’ll try to gather more data points; sometimes this distinction comes up in earnings calls from some companies.  However, Ill be very surprised if 25% turns out to be a steady-state industry average; I just can’t believe a company can make money with such a high rate of idle capacity.  I’m guessing that idle time may be inflated in the near-term due to poly shortages or ramp-up of new lines (everyone’s installing new lines these days).

Still writing a SOLF article – but the basic thesis is that SOLF has an imminent convertible offering, and the stock has runup 200% between the time of the first F-1 and now, (well, until this morn…).  The convertible terms aren’t set, so how will it be priced?  My thesis is a) convertible hedging normally depresses stock prices and b) note buyers would be insane to simply accept the 200% increase in the convertible terms.  Both of which lead me to believe SOLF will be well below yesterday’s $38 by the time the offering hits.   We’ll see.

Supply

Demand