JinkoSolar Holding Co., Ltd. (NYSE:JKS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rajiv Chaudhri: And first of all, congratulations on a superb quarter and for the very strong guidance. One question that has not been asked yet and is about the inventory reserve that you have taken in the quarter. Normally, your inventories tend to go up every quarter because you are growing the business and they grow up by $200 million to $250 million a quarter. This time, your inventory sequentially were down about $200 million quarter-to-quarter. And so my first question is, is it reasonable to think that the inventory reserve that you took was actually in the neighborhood of $400 million which would make sense given the sharp decline in the prices of poly. And obviously, at any point in time, you have a lot of poly in your working process. So the first question is, is the inventory reserve in the ballpark of $350 million or $400 million? And that your gross margin, without this inventory reserve, would actually be in the mid-20s in the second quarter?

Pan Li: Yes. Hello, Rajiv, this is Pan. And as I mentioned to the inventory reserve, yes, actually, we made some inventory reserve in the second quarter. And this has also impacted our margin gross margin, yes. At this stage, only a temporary treatment of the inventory. We don’t think it will be a long-term treatment to our inventory.

Rajiv Chaudhri: I understand that part. Obviously, it’s a onetime thing. The question is, was it in the ballpark of $400 million? And that you are — if the reserve was not taken, your true earnings would be $400 million higher?

Charlie Cao: You mean $400 million is one number. We provided roughly, I think, RMB500 million inventory provisions. But the second quarter, we — I think we do pretty good and we anticipated, let’s say, the partly decline starting from June. So we split up the inventory, good delivery and control the inventories very tight. That is why you are saying our total inventory, the numbers is — lower quarter-over-quarter. But we still have some kind of the orders and targeting the residential markets. The residential markets are the — it’s the kind of a to stay customers and they are typically, when the supply chain in particular, the enterprise has a significant, let’s say, adjustment which we typically will offer some price discounts to the natural customers. That is why from an accounting perspective, by the end of the second quarter, we recorded additional inventory onetime provisions and we don’t believe that is recurring items in the future.

Rajiv Chaudhri: Charlie, I understand this is not an ongoing thing. My question simply is reflecting what was the true earning power of the company in the second quarter. And what I’m trying to get at is that if the poly — if you exclude the impact that the sharp decline in poly prices have had on the inventory reserve, that your earnings would have been a lot higher, not just somewhat higher but a lot higher, maybe as much as $400 million higher.

Charlie Cao: You mean if let’s say the poly price has relatively stabilized, the module prices is a very, very stable. And for sure, it’s not this case and we are able to generate more earnings significantly.

Rajiv Chaudhri: So is it fair to say that without this inventory reserve, the gross margin could have been in the mid-20s, 24%, 25%?

Charlie Cao: Well, I think it’s roughly — I think without that, it’s roughly up to 20%.

Rajiv Chaudhri: And you expect it to be higher in the third quarter because the rate at which the price of modules is coming down is slower than the rate at which the poly price is coming down?

Charlie Cao: We expect strong — continued strong earnings. And because the N type modules, they have strong earnings generating power, we get more percentage shipments. And the second one is we have higher shipments in the U.S. markets. And so that is a combination of the 2, the key factors. And of course, the poly is done to be stabilized and module still it’s reaching kind of the stabilized point.