First Solar’s recent earnings provided several updates, highlighting a company that is financially confident while steadily increasing its bets on next‑generation technologies, especially perovskites. The company's net sales reached 1.0 billion USD in the first quarter, the company’s strongest Q1 on record, with module volumes up more than 30% year over year. Profitability was also notably higher, helped by improved factory efficiency and sharp reductions in freight and warehousing costs, and the company ended the quarter with around 2.4 billion USD in cash and investments, giving it plenty of room to fund new manufacturing lines and R&D.
R&D spending rose to 67 million USD in the quarter, up 15 million USD from a year earlier, with management explicitly tying this increase to perovskite development and the rollout of its CURE (CuRe) technology. Rather than treating these as short‑term expenses, the company framed them as deliberate, strategic investments aimed at maintaining a technological edge beyond its current CdTe platform.
The most concrete perovskite milestone is a planned 1 GW pilot line targeted for 2027. To support this, First Solar is reallocating back‑end tools from existing lines in Malaysia and Vietnam, which reduces the number of fully finished modules those plants can ship but creates the industrial space needed to move perovskites from lab to pilot scale. Management estimates that slightly under 2 GW of fully finished capacity remains available from those Southeast Asian plants for U.S. shipments, so there is a visible trade‑off between today’s throughput and tomorrow’s technology learning curve.
At the same time, the company is careful not to oversell the near‑term economics of perovskites. Executives stressed that early production costs on the pilot line will sit above those of high‑volume manufacturing, and that large‑scale deployment will depend on proving long‑term durability and bankability through extensive field data. In other words, the perovskite program is now funded and physically embedded in the manufacturing footprint, but both the cost curve and commercialization timing remain open questions.
Balancing this, First Solar’s core business remains robust. U.S. factories ran at about 96% utilization, the contracted backlog stood at 47.9 GW with 14.4 billion USD in transaction value, and the balance sheet is strong enough to absorb underutilization costs at overseas plants and near‑term headwinds from lower‑priced volumes in markets like India.
