CBD seems to be well positioned to hold its position in solar...

CBD seems to be well positioned to hold its position in solar installations in Australia in the next year to two years.

A well placed blogger on SilexSolar blogsite http://www.silexsolar.com/blog/ refers to (uncited) predictions that Australian PV installations will nearly quadruple from 80MW in 2009 to 300MW in 2010.

At the same time the Clean Energy Council of Australia hosted a meeting in Alice Springs early in 2010 where many predictions were made (e.g. PV at grid parity in Australia in 2014-5, number of solar installation and wholesale companies to halve in the next few years, product quality and quality service delivery to customers determining the survivors). Mind you, the same meeting cited residential PV installation costs of $6 per Watt peak in Australia which seems very high compared to Whirlpool/green/pv forum cited quotes of $10,000 pWp for 3kW ($3pWp). Also Suntech, LDK and other volume quality manufacturers of crystalline panels are rapidly closing in on $1pWp at the factory gate.

Marry this with a likely module price depression in Q1-Q2 2011 due to reduction in European Feed-in-Tariffs and rapid expansion of world crystalline PV production (see pv-tech.org for multiple predictions) and a COAG program to move to an Australia-wide gross FiT before the next election (or bye-bye Labor). The result will be an exploding PV market full of shonks where the quality installers will have to define and hold their brand to maintain market share.

All up, CBD's position as a large volume wholesalers and installer, system designer for residential and commercial systems, multiple energy technologies and current and expanding income from trailing maintenance contracts place CBD well ahead of listed competitors in Australia. SOO is moving in this direction as well but no results as yet.

In particular AIR and AFT are, I posit, very vulnerable to losing market share and profit due to the small to small-medium installation focus.

CBD is likely to be a stayer, all PV companies will be bolters next year right up until many collapse.