Shanghai, China - May 5, 2015

Solar photovoltaic companies, beset by global market recession and turbulent shakeout over the past few years, have been gradually picking up profit margins and increasing their R&D spending, and many of them are expanding their businesses by robust technology scouting, corporate venturing, and/or M&A activities. On the other hand, disruptive solar technologies are growing rapidly in the past few years. While Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) thin-film cells went beyound GW-capacity earlier along with the rapid growth of the market heavyweight, First Solar, copper indium gallium (di) selenide (CIGS) cells also hit the GW market with the fast expansion of Hanergy. In the meantime, other disruptive solar technologies, including but not limited to copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS), concentrated PV (CPV), organic PV (OPV), and organic-inorganic hybrid dolar cells, have chances to become game changers by 2020.

Innova Research will soon publish a report, entitled "Chasing the Sun: Searching for Game Changers in Disruptive Photovoltaic Technologies", in which, over 13,000 patents and 500 historical M&A and other technology partnerships made by the key players in the global solar market are analyzed to find the most promising solar technologies. These disruptive solar technologies are further evaluated on their major features, including easy to scale, future module efficiency gains, and the potential to reduce capital and material costs, and based on these, the likely winning solar technologies by 2020 will be recommended.

Nancy Wu, Research Director of Innova Research and the lead author of the report, commented "Vertically integrations in the solar industry value chain and the downstream capital operations greatly help solar incumbents to improve their cash flows, thus make the breakthrough of the disruptive solar technologies and the relevant material innovations possible. On the other hand, a rapid technology evolution and industry consolidation will provide vast opportunities to global leading solar players and new comers that seeking opportunities to enter the solar market. "