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 [分享]给澳龟扬眉吐气：《Forbes》：Sun King |
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hwarrensen
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作者：hwarrensen 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Sun King
The World's Billionaires
Sun King
Russell Flannery 03.27.06
Photovoltaics vendor Zhengrong Shi is worth only $2.2 billion. If he could just make solar power cost-effective, he could be really rich.
When President Bush touted solar power in his State of the Union address as a way to wean the U.S. from its addiction to oil, little did he know that his words would directly benefit an obscure China-born electrical engineer named Zhengrong Shi.
Obscure, yes. Poor, no. Shi, an Australian citizen, is mainland China’s richest man and one of its newest billionaires, worth $2.2 billion. His company, Suntech Power Holdings, produces solar cells, panels and related gear used to turn sunlight into electricity. Since their listing in December on the New York Stock Exchange, Suntech’s shares have nearly doubled, giving the company a $5.5 billion market value, the largest in the world for a manufacturer of solar cells.
Like so many Chinese firms, Suntech, based in the city of Wuxi, is gaining on its overseas competition. Its production nearly doubled last year, making it the world’s eighth-largest producer of solar cells, with $226 million in revenue, up from $85 million in 2004. Shi predicts Suntech’s sales will triple in the next three years, which would put it in the same ranks as Kyocera and Q-Cells. “Our success comes from being in a good industry,” says Shi, a modest man who rarely grants interviews.
Worldwide demand for solar cells has been growing 30% a year for the past three years, and the good times will likely continue. Solarbuzz, a research firm in San Francisco, predicts that the industry’s sales will climb from $10 billion this year to $19 billion in 2010. Such prospects have injected froth in solar stocks. At 57 times projected 2006 earnings, Suntech can’t even hold a candle to SunPower, a California solar cell maker at 131 times.
By the Numbers
Rise and Shine
Solar power is growing fast but is still an expensive energy source.
21 cents. Price per kWh for industrial solar power, four times the average price of electricity.
60% Percentage of annual worldwide solar energy capacity increase, 2000 to 2004.
2 The rank of silicon among elements in Earth’s crust.
Sources: Solarbuzz; U.S. Department of Energy; Renewable Energy Policy Network.
Suntech, which only in December started selling its solar panels in the U.S., has barely scratched the market in China, a country with a lot of remote outposts and an underdeveloped utility sector. China is now fourth in the world in solar cell production, after Japan, Germany and the U.S., according to industry consultant Paul Maycock, editor of the monthly newsletter PV News. Suntech accounts for more than half of China’s output. “Shi will have a lot of staying power in the industry,” says Jesse Pichel, a senior analyst at Piper Jaffray in New York.
Shi grew up in Jiangsu Province, on an island in the Yangtze River, and received a master’s degree in laser physics before leaving home for Australia in 1988. There he studied under Martin Green, whose laboratory at the University of New South Wales set a string of efficiency records for solar cells, raising the amount of sunlight energy that can be converted into electricity from 18% in 1983 to 24% in 2004. For the moment that attainment is a phenomenon of the lab only; commercial cells typically deliver 16% to 17%.
In 1995, three years after finishing his Ph.D., Shi went to Pacific Solar, a joint venture between the university and an Australian utility, Pacific Power, that specialized in a new variety of lower-cost photovoltaics called thin-film solar cells. Shi became an Australian citizen but was lured back to his homeland in 2001 by $6 million in seed capital offered by the city of Wuxi, 80 miles northeast of Shanghai.
Working on this shoestring, Shi bought secondhand equipment. He picked up manufacturing gear from the bankrupt U.S. company Astrosolar at 50 cents on the dollar. Taking advantage of China’s low wage rates, he has a lot of his 1,300 workers doing jobs that in Germany or Japan would be handed off to a robot. Suntech’s products are 10% cheaper than those of U.S. rivals, says analyst Pichel.
For now Shi has also managed to overcome the solar industry’s big headache: an extremely tight supply of silicon wafers. Contract prices are likely to rise by 30% or more this year and another 20% in 2007. Shi has long-term contracts for wafer supplies for 40% of his production, including a ten-year deal with Deutsche Solar in Germany.
Shi’s ability to innovate with new materials such as thin-film solar cells and silicon purification technologies will be crucial to his ability to keep up with industry heavies such as Sharp and bp Solar. The company’s public offering, which raised $400 million, will add $20 million to its research budget, more than it has spent since its inception.
Suntech’s work on silicon purification will help raise its sunlight-conversion efficiency to 18%, about 1.5 percentage points ahead of the industry, according to Shi. And he doesn’t rule out overseas mergers or acquisitions that advance his technology. “It’s ideas that will determine success,” he says.
Do solar cells pay for themselves? Not if conventional power is available. A 50-kilowatt system large enough to power a small office building costs about $350,000 to install. In a sunny state such as Arizona, this system can generate 80,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, which would normally cost $7,200 a year at a retail rate of 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, producing a crummy dividend of 2% (ignoring depreciation, tax benefits and subsidies). Outside of Japan, most of the solar industry survives on government incentives and demand for solar power at remote locations.
Shi says Suntech, like China itself, is ready to leapfrog. “Now the industry looks fairly small, and applications aren’t fairly spread. But I believe with the momentum that we have, in three to four years’ time it will really take off.”
Anything could happen. With a few more research breakthroughs or a continued rise in overall energy prices, unsubsidized solar might even become competitive with conventional power supplies.
But the solar industry has been striving toward that goal for the past few decades without much success.
作者：hwarrensen 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 [分享]给澳龟扬眉吐气：《Forbes》：Sun King -- hwarrensen - (6598 Byte) 2006-3-31 周五, 03:46 (2045 reads)
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