Issues in International Business Brenda McGinnis – Team Leader, Research. Presenter

1. Issues in International Business Brenda McGinnis – Team Leader, Research. Presenter Anna Kham – Research, Presenter, Comedy Relief Angela St. Charles – Presentation Design, Presenter

2. Company Profile & Background • Publicly-held U.S. company which specializes in solar energy. • It trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol ESLR. • Evergreen Solar was founded in 1994 by Mark Farber, who was the President and Chief Executive Officer until 2003. He is currently Vice President of Marketing and Business Development & a member of the Board of Directors. • The current CEO of Evergreen is Richard Feldt and has been since 2003 • The Company develops, manufactures and markets solar power products, including solar cells, panels, and systems • Its products are sold primarily in Europe and the United States and is based in Marlboro, Massachusetts. • It sells its products through domestic and international distributors, system integrators, project developers, and other resellers.

3. Company Profile & Background cont’ The Quest for Expansion • In 2006 Evergreen, Q-Cells and Renewable Energy Corporation (REC) formed EverQ, a joint venture to open a factory in Thalheim, Germany which is currently expanding to 300MW by 2010. • Until recently, Evergreen had a rather low manufacturing capacity of 15 MW.  In mid 2008 it opened a new facility in Devens, Massachusetts that has upped its yearly capacity by 80 MW.  There are plans to expand beyond this by increasing its manufacturing capacity to around 850 MW by the year 2012.  • In order to compete with other solar manufacturers the company signed a contract with Jiawei Solar Co. in Wuhan, China that will allow the firm to outsource jobs from their Devens facility starting in November. The outsourcing could potentially eliminate 150 to 200 jobs in Massachusetts starting in mid-2011.

4. The Wafer • The company’s key components are silicon wafers and solar cells. • Best known for manufacturing wafers using a technology called “String Ribbon” which reduces the amount of crystalline silicon needed in the manufacturing process by about 50%.  Since silicon can be one of the most expensive materials in producing solar panels, this means that Evergreen has potential to become the most cost-effective producer of solar panels . • The creation of a solar wafer starts off as just a flat piece of [high-grade] silicon. A solar cell is that same piece of silicon that has now been processed through a variety of chemical and mechanical processes, and now that cell is able to convert sunlight into electricity. A cell is very small and very fragile, in order to have a practical source of electricity; it needs to be assembled together with a bunch of cells. The company strings the cells together, put them in a glass lamination with an aluminum frame, and that’s a panel. The panels typically have about 200 watts and produce about 200 watts of power.

5. WHY EVERGREEN CHOOSE TO COLLOBRATE INTERNATIONALLY • It is much more cost efficient to produce the wafers and cells in China versus in Devens mainly due to lower labor and capital costs. • The collapse of the banks particularly affected the solar industry. Large commercial projects came to a grinding halt because they needed bank financing. • Right now the direct labor costs, overhead costs, as well as support from the Chinese government make it much less expensive to build solar in China than any other place in the world. And so most Western manufacturers — those in Europe, those in the United States — have or are planning major expansions in China. 

6. CHALLENGES EVERGREEN HAS FACED • For the first nine months of 2009, the company lost about $167 million compared with $34 million in the same time period a year ago. • Language barriers – needs more info. • Cultural barriers – needs more info.