From PV Magazine 6/25
Overproduction at levels that outweigh the final demand is untenable for every industry, and from 2022 to 2024 the PV industry over produced considerably, which leads to large storage growth and manufacturers of support in a corner.
At the end of 2024, Cru Group believes that the global module inventory has risen high enough to explain around 50% of the installations in the same year.
It is important to note that this oversupply did not arise due to a decrease in the final demand. In 2022, 2023 and 2024 there were strong installations in the PV industry, with impressive growth rates from year to year of 36%, 78%and 29%respectively. This installation growth has since delayed and Cru group predicts a growth rates of one digit in 2025 and afterwards, which means that the “wiggle room” for surplus production pending future market growth is further narrowed.
With an excess of delivery, manufacturers were left with an incredibly competing market. The costs that exceed the selling prices means that modules manufacturers have often had to accept negative profit margins, or run the risk of becoming completely out of the market.
This meant that in extreme cases, some manufacturers resorted to lower the corners to lower the production costs wherever they could to maintain the profit margins. In turn, industry has the extra obstacle of quality problems in 2024 and 2025. Subscribers of Cru and module and reliability test facility Kiwa Pvel’s jointly written “Solar Technology and Cost (STAC)” reports will be aware that PV modules do not have been seen with alarming rates.
Module -Innovation
But it is not all downfall and gloom. Despite a challenging market for manufacturers, innovation and improvements in the performance of module have not stopped. From the beginning of 2023 to the second quarter of 2025, commercial Tunneloxide -Passivated Contact (Topcon) module -Efficiency with 1.3% (absolute), which increases 22.76% to 24.06%. In the same time frame, largely powered by Aiko Solar and Longi Solar, improved commercial return contact Maximum module efficiency with a huge 3.0% (ABS.), From 22.53% to 25.54% and proves that innovation has by no means stopped.
When considering the average efficiency for the two technological categories, the improvement has been more modest. Topcon’s average efficiency increased by approximately 1.0% in the same time frame (ABS.), With the recurrence of contact with 1.2% (ABS.).
The most common question we receive from customers and industrial contacts today is: when will the downward pressure on the prices relieve and when will the dynamics of request request return to Balance?
Broadly speaking, there are two scenarios that would lead to the industry returning to the balance of delivery. It would be demanded that the final beverage would rise to a level where excess inventory was no longer ‘excess’. But with global demand growth in the coming years, this is an unlikely route back to balance. A more likely scenario depends on the production of manufacturers that scales the production, so that surplus inventory will gradually eliminate.
In 2024 it was generally assumed that prices could recover in the mid -2025. This was based on the prediction that a useful number of smaller manufacturers in 2024 would be forced by bankruptcy to be produced by bankruptcy. However, bankruptcies and decisions to withdraw from the PV market have come slower than both manufacturers and analysts expected.
Now, in the middle of 2025, the untenable overproduction started to turn a corner. Since the beginning of 2025, the “self -discipline” agreements between large Chinese manufacturers have helped reduce the production volumes of Polysilicon in January to April fell by more than 45% years after year and the production volumes of the Wafer fell by more than 20%. Although this has relieved overproduction, high supplies for polysilicon and, in many regions, have remained modules.
A possibility to go through the overhang in the inventory can approach the production -giants announced conservative goals, at least according to the PV industrial standards, both for capacity extensions and production guidance in 2025. There are rumors about even deeper production cuts that are planned by leading players. If manufacturers stick to less aggressive production growth in 2025, it seems increasingly likely that a downward pressure on prices in the PV-Supply Chain can rise in early to mid-2026. If manufacturers do not perform the necessary production cuts, a return to profitability for profitability for an indefinite period of time can stay “a year away”, such as the past 18 months.
After 2030
Technology transitions within the PV industry can occur quickly when a rival technology offers improved performance at cost parity for current regular technology. This was clear with the rapid transition from back surface to Passivated Emitter Achter Cell (PERC), and in turn from Perc to Topcon. In the room of two years, the market share of Topcon rose from around 20% in 2023 to around 80% in 2025. Topcon is expected to maintain its current dominance of the market share for the next two years. Furthermore, new rivals are already on the rise, although it is not yet clear, which will most likely dine Topcon in the future.
Topcon and heterojunction (HJT) technologies have similar theoretical efficiency limits, none of the technology currently seems more likely to determine a long -term and significant efficiency label. Nowadays, the two technologies in broad lines offer comparable maximum and average efficiency commercial, with only a slight lead from HJT in the past quarters. But despite the fact that Topcon and HJT are competitive in terms of efficiency, the two are currently not competing in terms of production costs.
The low production costs of Topcon are the key to the technology that dominates in terms of market share and production capacities. As such, Cru Group believes that HJT will have difficulty winning a meaningful market share of Topcon with its higher production costs, unless technology can establish a meaningful efficiency lead. For HJT to achieve a cost-watt parity, we should achieve and retain the technology of at least 2.5% of our Bottom-Up cost modeling of our Bottom-Up cost modeling. It seems unlikely that HJT efficiency will overtake Topcon on this scale.
A more likely technological transition is from Topcon to Rugcontact, where contact with return contact is likely to be given the market share during the rest of the decade due to improved performance, higher efficiency and competitive costs. Currently, Back-Contact-in particular has achieved topcon-back contact (TBC) cellarchitecture efficiency cables of approximately 1.5% (ABS) over Topcon and HJT. But this is only achieved for the best performing contact modules in the second quarter of 2025, with the difference between the average efficiency of the two technologies much smaller with 0.5% (ABS.). However, Back contact technology offers this higher efficiency at the expense of higher production costs compared to Topcon.
As with all important technologies on the market, Back-Contact offers a huge distribution of efficiency within the individual technology category. This means that every persistent lead in efficiency at manufacturers must be achieved a wider to make a widespread technological transition possible, at least if the production costs remain above that of Topcon.
We currently expect our internal cost modeling that the costs of sold goods (COGS) for TBC will come close to parity with Cogs for Standaard (both sides) Topcon by 2028, before they may fall very lightly in the StandaCon in 2030. This means that we could see a considerable transition to the end of the decade. However, there is no clear crossover of costs in our prediction, as we saw in the past with our modeling for Topcon versus Mono Perc, which makes it unclear whether a shift in industry would be or whether the two technologies can co -exist. In both scenarios we expect that return contact will be a more common product range among module manufacturers in the coming years.
The driving force of the PV industry is usually a motivation to improve performance or to lower costs. Since 2017, the industry has been in an “performance improvement” era, which means that absolute cost reductions became more difficult to achieve, but the efficiency of the module improved quickly. Towards the end of the decade, it is likely that crystalline silicon technologies will approach realistic efficiency limits. How will the industry continue to strive for further performance improvements?
Another technological transition emerges on the horizon. In the early 2030s, Cru Group believes that tandem technologies, in particular silicon-perovskiet designs, can get a large scale on a large scale because of a much higher efficiency potential compared to silicon devices with one junction. With some manufacturers who are already producing commercial perovskiet teeth modules today, albeit on very small scales, the early start of a tandem-technological transition is already moving. 
About the authors
Alex Barrows is head of PV at Cru Group. He focuses on when and how new technologies will influence the PV market. He also supervises the PV market data analysis for the company.
Molly Morgan is a senior research analyst at Cru Group. Her areas of attention include following and predicting evolution in efficiency and architecture of solar module. She analyzes the production capacity of solar energy, production figures and financial data.
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