Panasonic to build solar panel plant in Malaysia

Reuters    Translate This Article
17 November 2011

TOKYO (Reuters) - Panasonic Corp will invest as much as 50 billion yen ($645 million) to build a solar panel plant in Malaysia, its first such facility overseas, as a strong yen pushes up production costs at home, two industry sources told Reuters.

The firm, which has been touting environmental and energy technology as key growth areas, dropped a plan to convert a television panel plant in Western Japan into a solar power factory in October because of the rising yen and an industry price war.

The Malaysia plant will start production in the financial year starting next April and bolster the company's solar output capacity by 50 percent to about 900 MW, the sources said.

The company plans both production of solar cells and assembly of solar panels at the plant, the sources said.

Panasonic declined to confirm the plan. 'We will announce details of our solar panel growth strategy at the appropriate time,' said company spokesman Akira Kadota.

Competition among Japan's big solar panel makers, including Sharp Corp and Kyocera Corp, is intensifying as they look to compete with rivals overseas.

At the same time demand for solar panels is expected to slump in Europe due to cuts in government funding.

Sales of solar cells in Japan rose 28.7 percent in the July-September quarter from the same period a year earlier, slowing for the seventh straight quarter. Solar panel exports from Japan fell 11.3 percent in the same period.

Shares in Panasonic, which is forecasting its biggest loss in a decade for the year to March 2012, were down 1.7 percent at 680 yen by early afternoon trade on Friday, compared with a 1.3 percent fall in the Nikkei average.

($1 = 76.985 Japanese Yen)

(Reporting by Reiji Murai and Tim Kelly; Writing by Isabel Reynolds; Editing by Joseph Radford and Michael Watson)

© Copyright 2011 Reuters

Reuters content is the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters or its third party content providers. Any copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. 'Reuters' and the Reuters Logo are trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. For additional information on other Reuters media services please visit reuters.com/newsagency.

Every day Global Good News documents the rise of a better quality of life dawning in the world from good news reported by the press; and highlights the need for introducing Natural Law based-Total Knowledge based-programmes to bring the support of Nature to every individual, raise the quality of life of every society, and create a lasting state of world peace.



Translation software is not perfect; however if you would like to try it, you can translate this page using:

(Google) Select a language English to Afrikaans English to Albanian English to Arabic English to Belarusian English to Bulgarian English to Catalan English to Chinese (Simplified) English to Chinese (Traditional) English to Croatian English to Czech English to Danish English to Dutch English to Estonian English to Filipino English to Finnish English to French English to Galician English to German English to Greek English to Hebrew English to Hindi English to Hungarian English to Icelandic English to Indonesian English to Irish English to Italian English to Japanese English to Korean English to Latvian English to Lithuanian English to Macedonian English to Malay English to Maltese English to Norwegian English to Persian English to Polish English to Portuguese English to Romanian English to Russian English to Serbian English to Slovak English to Slovenian English to Spanish English to Swahili English to Swedish English to Thai English to Turkish English to Ukrainian English to Vietnamese English to Welsh English to Yiddish

(Altavista babelfish) Select a languageEnglish to Chinese-simpEnglish to Chinese-tradEnglish to DutchEnglish to PortugueseEnglish to FrenchEnglish to GermanEnglish to GreekEnglish to ItalianEnglish to JapaneseEnglish to KoreanEnglish to RussianEnglish to Spanish

Send Good News to Global Good News.

Your comments.