ReneSola Ltd (NYSE:SOL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ke Chen: Yes, Donovan. First of all, we actually — this deal are very good in terms of cash flow for us, and we sell at a very good price. But compared to when this was built more than three years ago, again, the cost at that time is much higher than the cost base. So that’s because, again, accounting treatment. So that’s a loss based on accounting treatment. But from a tax flow point of view, this is a very good deal for us, and we expect very good cash inflow for this project sales. And yes, we are expecting to continue to sell some of this legacy project to, again, attract some cash. But from an accounting point of view, we do expect some of these accounting losses.

Donovan Schafer: Okay. Thank you. That’s helpful. And if I could just squeeze one more in on gross margins. Gross margins look really great for the quarter, and that was nice to see. And I imagine IPP revenue was about 30% of revenue for the quarter. I’m imagining this is sort of saying, okay, you’ve been building more of this IPP portfolio, you’ve got Branston, which has become a big part of it and then didn’t have a strong contribution in Q1 because that’s not a sunny time of the year. But now Q2 boom, here we see it. So I’m just curious if you can help us kind of separate out gross margins. What were — do you have the information? Could you share what the gross margins were for the IPP business? Because I know those tend to be very high. And then if you strip that out, what would the gross margins be for the rest of the business, just excluding the IPP business?

Ke Chen: Yes. In Q2, you actually mentioned that Q2 is a good season for the silver generation. So again, IPP margin is very high, around about 70% gross margin. Our project development is over 30%. And also, again, we did mention these different servers gross margin, not also pretty high, above 50%. That’s related to our Italy business.

Donovan Schafer: Well, the blended gross margin was —

Ke Chen: 37%.

Donovan Schafer: 37, so what kind of — is it just that a lot of it was the 30% for projects? Because the numbers you gave, if you kind of combine all that, you think you’d even get into like the 40%. So is there — is it the EPC services? Is that part of what kind of drags it down spend.

Ke Chen: Yes, the EPC revenue is over $8 million, but the EPC margin is very low.

Donovan Schafer: Yes. Is it sort of between 0% and 10%, but still positive. I mean was it positive for the quarter?

Ke Chen: It’s 1%, almost breakeven.

Donovan Schafer: Okay. Got it. I know how that ties into all your models. So I totally understand that. All right. Thanks, guys. I’ll get back in the queue.

Ke Chen: Thank you, Donovan.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Phil Shen with ROTH MKM. You may proceed.

Matthew Koranda: Hey, guys. This is Matt on for Phil. Thanks for taking the questions. First, I just wanted to get your outlook for energy pricing in the back half of the year and where you think that could go in 2024. And if you continue to expect to benefit from higher energy pricing?

Yumin Liu: Let me answer your question in two ways. One is the, for example, we do have our major contributor, 50 megawatts Branston project. We do have four-year PPAs starting from April 1st this year, going there all the way four years locked PPA with very favorable PPA price. All other talking about the merchant price in the European market, we see the current price is absolutely a lot lower than 12 months ago or even than like eight, nine months ago. Okay. Going to in the average country by country, about $70 to $90 per megawatt hour. But going into 2024, we do see the uptrend of the price going from the current number to as high as 25% to 40% higher compared to today, okay? That literally led us to believe our IPP strategy in Europe is absolutely sustainable, and we are applying our IPP strategy continuously in Europe.