Author Archives: Scalper1

First Solar ( FSLR ) stock tumbled Thursday on its $100-million-plus Q1 sales miss late Wednesday and the “understandable” but likely-to-raise-questions resignation of CEO Jim Hughes, Credit Suisse analyst Patrick Jobin says. CFO Mark Widmar will succeed Hughes, effective July 1. Alexander Bradley, vice president of global project finance and treasurer, will step in for Widmar. Hughes led First Solar out of its rocky May 2012 “crisis,” Jobin wrote in a research report. “Polysilicon costs were plummeting and First Solar’s technology was becoming cost disadvantaged,” Jobin wrote. “He successfully regained First Solar’s position of strength, the company’s panel is close to multi-crystalline,” he wrote. The management shift was inevitable, but “changes always tend to raise questions,” Jobin noted. He kept his neutral rating and 72 price target on First Solar stock. In afternoon trading on the stock market today , First Solar stock was down 6.5%, leading a broad 3% tumble in IBD’s 20-company Energy-Solar industry group. Shares of No. 2 rival SunPower ( SPWR ) were down nearly 2%. Residential installers Vivint Solar ( VSLR ) and Sunrun ( RUN ) stocks were down 3.5% and 2.5%, respectively, but shares of No. 1 rival SolarCity ( SCTY ) were up a fraction. For Q1, First Solar reported 3% year-over-year sales growth to $848 million and $1.66 earnings per share, swinging from a 62-cent per-share loss in the year-earlier period. EPS topped views after First Solar sold a 15% stake in its Desert Stateline project to Southern Co. ( SO ) and gained a one-time $38 million cash boost from its module recycling program, Mizuho analyst James von Riesemann wrote in a report. But analysts called for $958.3 million in sales, up 106% year over year. Adjusting for the Stateline and one-time asset sale, First Solar’s EPS would have come in around $1.06, Jobin wrote, still beating the consensus of 21 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters for 93 cents. First Solar blamed shifting to lower-priced, module-only sales for the disappointing Q1 sales, von Riesemann reported. He reiterated his neutral rating and 67 price target on First Solar stock. “The key issue appears to be how First Solar’s customers re-sort the timing of projects, given the ITC (investment tax credit) extension and how those customers’ procurement projects will be built up,” he wrote. Hughes noted as much in his remarks on the the company’s late Wednesday earnings conference call. Congress extended the key solar subsidy in December, pushing its expiration date out five years from the initial Dec. 31, 2016, end date. Analysts had predicted a sharp drop-off in installations following the ITC expiration. “In the U.S., the ITC extension has led to an increase in overall opportunity, but customers continue to work through revisions to project timing,” he said. That “has led to some temporary delays in new contracted bookings.”