First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Others are looking at if they will. Let’s look at the Christmas silicon supply that is actually able to address whether it’s the U.S. market or even the India market. And that’s largely going to be in India particular, it’ll be domestic production. In the U.S., there’s potentially some supply that can come from Southeast Asia and address the U.S. market, but it also generally is going to have to use non-Chinese poly. And obviously that’s more of a constrained available resource than Chinese poly. And so €“ and then there’s also the component around domestic content and policy criteria and ultimately what defines domestic content. And there’s still a lot of work to be done there, but I think there is momentum going on that says there has to be true substance for production in the U.S. in order to meet the domestic content criteria, which is more than €“ most likely just module assembly and it could potentially include the cell.

And as of right now, there’s not a lot of announcements in the U.S., where there’ll be actually not just module assembly but cell production here in the U.S., and again, having to use non-Chinese poly to do that. And so I think when everybody takes all those dynamics together and evaluate where, what type of risk profile they’re wanting to accept, the great thing about IRA is that there’s a piece for everyone, right? The opportunity for everyone, whether you’re the developer or whether you’re the module manufacturer or whether you’re the IPP or the utility who’s going to own the generating asset over time, there’s opportunity for everybody. And so the question is, do you want to sort of secure your business plan and take risk off the table?

And if you’re willing to do that and do that at a fair price, then First Solar is a great option to do that. If you’re trying to take some risk and you’re wanting to find opportunities to avail yourself to potentially alternative supplies that maybe will still allow you to benefit to the maximum potential under IRA, then that’s a risk that some may want to take and wait. But what we see right now is that we’ve got more than enough opportunity to engage. Yes, it’s an item that is in some of our customers’ thought process. But for the most part, most people aren’t paying a lot of attention to it in that regard. Pricing-wise, in the U.S. and domestic content, look the deals that we’re pricing today include both domestic production and include international production.

We are differentiated in the pricing. We’re not reflecting that in the breakout into the bookings ASP, but we are differentiated pricing. So our domestic production will be generally at a premium to our international production. So that is being captured in the bookings that we’re recognizing today. Now, there is a whole bunch of volume that sits in 2024 and 2025 that we are engaging with customers on to have conversations for certainty of allocation, because the contracts in 2024 and 2025 do not require specific allocation from a specific factory. So in those cases, we are talking about if we are allocating from a domestic production there should be some consideration for that and potential adjustments to ASPs, which is what we referenced before in the last quarter.

We booked 1.4 gigawatts in the last earnings call, this last quarter we booked a few more hundreds of megawatts, not a lot, but a few more. And most of that’s coming through at a nice uplift around $0.03 to $0.04. So a lot of opportunities still to go get that and work to be done. We’ll update you over the next few quarters if we realize that benefit.

Operator: Thank you. And now we will go to Colin Rusch of Oppenheimer.

Colin Rusch: Thanks so much, guys. Can you talk just a little bit about the cadence of CapEx as well as the unwind on the deferred revenue?

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