On April 20, the share price of Sungrow, the leader in photovoltaic inverters, fell by the limit. On April 21, the company's stock price continued to fall by 10.54%, and the total market value fell below 100 billion yuan.
The rapid adjustment of Sungrow's share price stemmed from the fact that the company's performance fell short of market expectations. On April 19, Sungrow released its 2021 annual report and 2022 first quarter report. The data shows that the company will achieve revenue of 24.137 billion yuan in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 25.15%, and the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies is 1.583 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 19.01%; in the first quarter of this year, it achieved revenue of 4.568 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36.48%; The net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 411 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.26%.
Sungrow is the world's largest solar photovoltaic inverter company, and the company's core product photovoltaic inverter has a large market advantage. However, due to factors such as the epidemic and rising raw material prices, the company's performance last year experienced a situation of increasing revenue but not profit.
Sungrow's main business is the research and development, production, sales and service of new energy power equipment such as solar energy, wind energy, energy storage, and electric vehicles. The main products are photovoltaic inverters, wind power converters, energy storage systems, and new energy vehicle drives. systems, surface photovoltaic systems, smart energy operation and maintenance services, etc.
According to the 2021 annual report, the revenue of power conversion equipment such as photovoltaic inverters of Sungrow reached 9.051 billion yuan, accounting for 37.50% of the revenue, an increase of 20.44% year-on-year; the investment and development revenue of power stations reached 9.679 billion yuan, accounting for the proportion of revenue. It was 40.10%, a year-on-year increase of 17.65%; the energy storage system revenue was 3.138 billion yuan, accounting for 13.00% of the revenue, a year-on-year increase of 168.51%.
Since 2015, Sungrow's inverter shipments have ranked first in the world for many consecutive years. In 2021, the company's global PV inverter shipment volume will be 47GW, including 18GW domestically and 29GW overseas, with a global market share of more than 30%. As of December 2021, the company's global cumulative installed capacity of inverter equipment has exceeded 224GW.
The 2021 annual report shows that the gross profit margin of power conversion equipment such as Sungrow photovoltaic inverters is 33.80%, a decrease of 1.23 percentage points from the same period of the previous year. Sungrow said that, attracted by the huge potential of domestic and foreign markets, the market competition is still very fierce. If the company cannot maintain its leading edge in technological innovation, new product development and cost control, the company's products face the risk of declining product gross profit margins.
It is understood that in 2021, due to the mismatch of supply and demand in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, the long expansion cycle of upstream capacity, and the high expected installed capacity of the photovoltaic industry, the price of silicon materials will rise sharply, and this will be transmitted to the entire photovoltaic industry chain, silicon wafers, cells, modules. The price of each link has risen to varying degrees.
Sungrow stated in its 2021 annual report that the increase in module prices may lead to a certain degree of delay in the installation of photovoltaic power plants in the company's power station investment and development business, which will affect the development and construction of the company's photovoltaic power station projects, thereby affecting the power station investment and development business income. level and gross profit margin. From the perspective of the overall supply and demand of the industry, with the gradual release of upstream production capacity, the tight supply and demand situation will continue to improve, the price of components will gradually return to a reasonable level, and the global installed capacity will resume growth.
In 2021 and the first quarter of this year, Sungrow will increase revenue but not profit. Sungrow stated at the performance exchange meeting that the performance in 2021 was lower than expected, and the core reason was that there were several problems in the power station business. Specifically, the epidemic situation caused the Vietnamese project not to be connected to the grid in October, and the implementation of the new electricity price led to the provision; the Myanmar project was cancelled for some reason, resulting in some expenses, and the overseas energy storage business was fined due to the impact of the epidemic, resulting in no increase in revenue. profit. Overall, the performance has been reduced by about 1 billion yuan.
In recent years, Sungrow's overseas business scale has grown year by year. From 2018 to 2021, the revenue of overseas regions was 1.382 billion yuan, 3.272 billion yuan, 6.602 billion yuan, and 9.177 billion yuan respectively, and the proportion of revenue also expanded rapidly from 13.33% to 38.02%, but the gross profit margin decreased year by year, respectively 48.49% , 40.56%, 35.16%, 27.45%.
In the first quarter of 2019, the export value of Sungrow's inverters was US$62 million (excluding the US$54 million from the Indian factory), ranking first in the country; the scale of overseas shipments was 3.75GW, of which domestic exports were 2.39GW and Indian factories shipped 1.36 GW, ranking first in the country. Sungrow continued to expand its overseas market layout. In 2019, the company's global shipments reached 17.1GW, a year-on-year increase of 2.4%, and the overseas shipments reached 9GW, a year-on-year increase of 87.5%; in Southeast Asia, the company also maintained a market share of more than 30%.
While the export volume has increased significantly, due to the significant increase in shipping costs, the shipping period has been greatly extended, resulting in a substantial increase in inventory. As of the end of March this year, the company's inventory balance reached 13.03 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 180.55%.
On the other hand, it can be seen from the performance of other domestic photovoltaic enterprises that the competition of overseas inverters may gradually intensify in the future.
