The Hindu Business Line : Moser Baer halts production processes at solar panel plant

New Delhi, July 9 Moser Baer said on Thursday that certain production processes in its solar Photovoltaic plant at Greater Noida, have been temporarily shut down, due to inventory build-up. Mr Yogesh Mathur, Group Chief Financial Officer, Moser Baer India, claimed the move would have minimum or no impact on sales.

“We have the required inventory to cover us for the current period,” he said.

Mr Mathur said that the decision had been taken on account of gradual recovery in the international market and the manufacturing capacity mismatch in various stages of production.

Meanwhile, Moser Baer’s consolidated losses for year ended March 2009 widened to Rs 363.75 crore against Rs 202.28 crore in the previous year, largely on the back of operating losses in the PV business and provision for impairment of strategic investment.

Moser Baer’s consolidated net sales rose 22.6 per cent to Rs 2617.69 crore as compared to Rs 2134.60 crore in Financial Year 08.

Seen segment wise, income from storage media products increased 3.2 per cent to Rs 1837.17 crore; while net sales from solar products stood at Rs 341.30 crore compared to Rs 169.50 crore in FY08.

The Moser Baer Group produces solar photovoltaic panels at a manufacturing complex in Greater Noida. The production of these panels entails about 32 steps, the company explained. The manufacturing plant had excess capacity in some of these steps— that is production capacity in the upstream process had become higher than that in the downstream process, a Moser Baer statement said.

This resulted in inventory build-up in some of the processes. Moser Baer said that while it has ordered balancing equipment to correct the situation, the production processes at some of these steps had been temporarily closed down for a period between six and eight weeks. “Employees engaged in those stages of the process have either been re-deployed or given temporary leave until full production resumes,” it said. A company official said that the move impacted more than 200 employees.

Last month, speaking to Business Line, Dr Rajiv Arya, Chief Executive Officer of Moser Baer Photo Voltaic, had said that the company’s capacity expansion roadmap for manufacturing solar cells and modules could get pushed,back by one or two quarters, to 2010-end, as the company awaited clarity in the demand environment amid the global credit squeeze.

In the Greater Noida facility, the company had initially planned to expand, by mid-2010, its current capacity from 80 MW to 180MW for crystalline silicon; from 40MW to 130MW for Thin Film technology; and from 5 MW to 10MW for concentrator technology.

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