Why China’s solar boom is a bust for its leading players
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. XI’AN, China—This should be a shining moment for Longi, one of the biggest makers of solar-power equipment in the world. Longi and a few other Chinese companies dominate the solar business globally.
Their home nation is in the midst of an unprecedented installation boom, with more than 100 gigawatts of capacity added in the first half of this year alone. Yet in the upside-down world of the Chinese solar industry—and many other industries in the country—the boom is a bust for the companies involved. Longi’s chairman, Zhong Baoshen, is fighting to reverse losses amid the bloodbath he predicted last year, when he saw that a glut of capacity would soon overwhelm the industry.
In the U.S., the one global market where prices remain high, Zhong is confronting suspicion about China’s national aims. His earlier initiatives to tap U.S. demand hit geopolitical obstacles.
“We paid billions in tuition fees" to learn how to navigate U.S. politics, he said. The 56-year-old businessman’s life has been a lesson in China’s industrial triumphs as well as its perils.
With two college friends from the physics department, he built a company that was valued at $80 billion at its peak. Longi didn’t just copy Western or Japanese technology—it took risks on innovation that changed the industry. Whipsawing government policy, while helping to create a market for solar panels, has brought Zhong’s company to its knees twice, the first time more than a decade ago and again this year.
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