Jim Brown

Is There Value in Silicon Solar PV?

rana - totally agree early growth is unsustainable, but it separates the potential stars from average startups. Due diligence seems to be appropriate, i.e., keep your eyes open and ears to the ground.

alpha24seven - I am aware of 8-10 CIGS privately held companies. And CIGS on glass seems to have highest conversion numbers per the NREL. Some use evaporation, electroplating, printing (like Nanosolar) on foil, thin film silicon and thin stainless. Since they are private we only hear the positive news, and successes, and potential capabilities. Perhaps they will provide real information at InterSolar this week. But then we can't trade their stock, and we are stuck with consensus estimates or guesses on those that are public. I expect it will be six to 18 months until we learn of actual sales, along with hopefully: sales prices per watt, conversion % and production capability(and $ in and out) for them all. And perhaps some will go public.

Is There Value in Silicon Solar PV?

Rana - If you google PEG, you will get:
The PEG ratio, Price/Earnings To Growth, is a valuation metric for determining the relative trade-off between the price of a stock, the earnings generated per share (EPS), and the company's expected growth.(Price/Annual Earnings)/%Annual Growth. If a company is growing at 30% a year, then the stock's P/E could be 30 to have a PEG of 1. PEG ratios between 1 and 2 are therefore considered to be in the range of normal values. A crude analysis suggests that companies with PEG values between 0 to 1 may provide higher returns.

A lower ratio is "better" (cheaper) and a higher ratio is "worse" (expensive). A PEG ratio that approaches two or goes higher than 2 is believed to be too high. This means that the price paid appears to be much too high relative to the projected earnings growth.

They also say that some people use high future growth rates , as much as five years out, which can be set arbitrarily high. I used only the numbers in the tables, and did not attempt to project out in this new industry.

Tonny - CSUN only produced 9MW of 17.2% efficiency cells in Q1 and their last 4 qtrs eps were $-0.09, $-0.11, $-0.06, and $0.01 and they just closed a Convertible Sr note offering to increase production and improve product efficiency. They are behind the curve of these other Silicon companies in product and earnings growth.