Mitsubishi Electric Corp aims to more than triple sales at its solar power business as rising prices of oil boost demand for renewable energy, Bloomberg News reported.
Revenue at the business will climb to 170 billion yen (US$1.56 billion) in the 12 months ending in March 2012, from 50 billion yen last fiscal year, Senior Executive Officer Kazuyuki Nakamura, who heads the division that includes solar operations, said at a briefing in Tokyo yesterday.
Mitsubishi Electric, the world's sixth-largest maker of solar cells, said it will invest 50 billion yen to expand output and build a second factory in Nagano, central Japan, that's scheduled to be completed by December 2009. The plant will help the Tokyo-based company raise its solar cell output capacity to 600 megawatts in the year to March 2012, from 150 megawatts in August 2007, it said.
Mitsubishi Electric follows Sharp Corp in bolstering solar cell production to meet demand in an expanding market. Global sales of solar cells will probably climb almost fourfold to US$40 billion in 2010, from US$10.8 billion in 2006, according to Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd.
Nakamura said Mitsubishi Electric aims to increase its share of the solar cell market to 10 percent in 2012 from 3.2 percent in 2007.
Sharp, which competes with Germany's Q-Cells AG to be the world's largest solar-cell producer, said in March that it will spend 72 billion yen to build a solar battery factory. With the new plant, the Osaka-based company targets 1 gigawatt of thin-film solar power capacity by April 2010, up from an estimated 160 megawatts by October this year, it said at the time.
Mitsubishi Electric shares rose 0.8 percent to close at 930 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange yesterday. It has dropped 20 percent this year.
