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Solar push shows this is not your father's Applied Materials |
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Mar 20, 2007 at 11:33 AM |
If you were unfamiliar with Applied Materials and had checked most of the company's recent announcements, you might think it was a solar-cell manufacturing equipment company with a green streak a kilometer wide.
Starting in early February with the appointment of Winfried Hoffman as CTO of its solar business group, Applied has publicized such photovoltaic successes as scoring a deal to build a thin-film PV manufacturing line for Moser Baer in India and beginning the installation of a 1.9-megawatt solar power plant---supposedly the largest of its kind in the U.S.---at its own research campus in Sunnyvale.
Hot off today's newswire comes another sunny story from Applied: the company has landed the contract to build what's being called Europe's first large-scale thin-film solar-module production line for T-Solar Global of Spain. Applied says the first modules should come off T-Solar's fully integrated line by the middle of 2008.
This deal, along with the Moser Baer win, find AMAT leveraging its flat-panel display manufacturing equipment expertise for making big glass-substrate solar panels, something the company claims no one other PV toolmaker is able to do. Although the dollar value of the two deals has not been made public, Applied has aggressively asserted itself as a player to be reckoned with in the burgeoning solar-cell manufacturing business.
On a related note, according to Solarbuzz's Marketwatch 2007 report issued yesterday, Spain is one of the fastest growing markets for solar cells. Installations of photovoltaic modules in Spain increased more than 200% in 2006, outpacing growth rates in Germany, Japan, and the United States. Germany retains its overall leadership though, garnering 55% of the global market---which translates to 960 of the 1744 megawatts installed worldwide.
The report also notes that revenues for the global PV industry reached $10.6 billion in 2006, while capital investment through "the PV business chain" came in at $2.8 billion. In an area of material concern to both semiconductor and PV manufacturers---the polysilicon shortage---the study says that poly supplies will remain tight in 2007, constraining solar-cell production throughout the year.
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