Goldman Sachs’ Stocks With Highest Consensus Returns: 42 Stocks With The Highest Consensus ROE

10. First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR)

Consensus ROE: 26%

Number of Hedge Fund Investors in Q2 2024: 66

First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR) is a solar power products firm that primarily caters to the needs of businesses and industrial users. As clean energy stocks have struggled during today’s era of high interest rates which make financing costly projects expensive, one would expect that First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR) would have fared similarly. However, the firm’s shares are up 19% year to date which can be attributed primarily to the Biden Administration’s decision to increase tariffs on Chinese origin solar panels to 50% from 25%. These fare well for First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR) as the pressure on it to reduce prices to compete with cheap Chinese products drops. Yet, despite these tailwinds, clean energy stocks are among the most volatile on the market. This is also the case for First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR), as its shares tanked by 9% in October after Jefferies cut the share price target to $266 from $271 as it cautioned that the firm’s upcoming third quarter results could be disappointing on the back of lower volumes.

First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR) is also aggressively targeting the budding demand for AI power. Here’s what management shared during its Q1 2024 earnings call:

“So I don’t know if I have a good number for you. I would say, if you look at the companies that we talked about on the call, the ones that we’re going to be adding today in demand significantly, Apple Google, Microsoft, Meta, they value certainty even more than the utility. So if you think about utility potentially contract multiple projects, and they can deal with a level of failure or delay in a way that you guys can’t if they have commitment to renewable targets at certain times. So they value certainty, and they certainly value the reliability of where the product is coming from and the concerns around slave labor. So we tend to be the first port of call for many of these companies or the developers who are doing the work for them.

And so in many cases, developers will come to us saying that they have had discussions with these people and that they’ve a preference to buy or work with the solar products, especially for U.S.-based demand. So, I don’t think I have a percentage I can give you, but I would say that generally, we’re going to be the favored supplier to the project that are going to be supplying power to these data centers or these kind of asset owners.”