ECD Maintains 1GW Capacity Target

PV-Tech/Mark Osborne/February 10, 2009

Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. has reiterated plans to reach 1GW of nominal production capacity of its flexible a-Si thin-film photovoltaics in 2010. Company executives also said in a conference call with financial analysts that they had added 60MW of nominal capacity in the last six months, bringing total capacity to 178MW. A new site had also been chosen to bring capacity up to 420MW in 2010.

ECD posted revenues for its second quarter of fiscal 2009 of US$103.1 million, compared to US$95.8 million from the first quarter and US$56.4 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2008. Solar product sales were US$97.3 millio, compared to US$89.5 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2009.

Despite acknowledgements that the company was not immune from the global economic downturn and tight credit markets that had seen order push-outs in recent months, executives guided full fiscal year revenues to reach between US$395 - US$440 million, with solar product sales reaching between US$375 - US$410 million.

ECD noted that its order backlog had increased by approximately US$400 million to reach US$2.4 billion. However, it was not clear whether the increase was based on take-or-pay contracts, due to an overall decline of approximately US$100 in such order backlogs on its balance sheets.

Executives remained bullish on demand for the second-half of the year as demand for BIPV and commercial rooftop installations in France and Italy are expected to grow, due to the favourable feed-in tariffs for such installations over land based projects in these countries.

In the U.S. ECD executives noted that the stimulus packages as well as a range of new legislation at the state level would boost demand for solar in the country by a substantial amount and that ECD expected to benefit from these positive actions.

ECD has approximately US$468 million in cash and short- and long-term investments and plans to meet capacity goals using these reserves and cash from future operations.

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