SolarWorld was a top-three solar maker — then China priced it into insolvency

SolarWorld, based in Bonn, was once the flagship of German solar energy — at its peak one of the world's three biggest solar power companies and, by the end, the last major German maker of solar cells. Its founder and chief executive, Frank Asbeck, was a leading voice for the European industry and led the fight against what he called illegal price dumping of Chinese solar modules in the United States and Europe.

The market turned against it. Around the turn of the decade, generous feed-in tariffs that had underwritten European solar demand were slashed, and far cheaper Chinese modules flooded in. SolarWorld blamed plummeting prices caused by intense Chinese competition, arguing that Chinese manufacturers had circumvented the antidumping measures meant to keep them out. The dumping, the company said, only intensified.

A premium manufacturer with a German cost base could not sell at the prices Chinese rivals were setting. By May 2017 SolarWorld was over-indebted and obliged to file for insolvency — a step Asbeck called bitter for the German solar industry. About 3,000 employees were affected; the company said it would try to save as many jobs and as much production as possible.

SolarWorld is the clearest European example of a whole industry losing its manufacturing base to Chinese scale. The lesson is not that the company was badly run — it fought the trade case and kept its technology competitive — but that in a commodity market the low-cost producer sets the price, and a premium cost base cannot survive a subsidy withdrawal and a dumping wave at the same time.