First Solar

hello everybody and welcome back to the show i'm joined today with matt and i'm gonna let him introduce himself go ahead matt

uh good morning i'm matt edwards i am the uh plant facilities manager and maintenance manager for first solar in gaffney south carolina We've got a brand new 1.2 million square foot plant that we've built here this year.

And we're in the process of starting up four lines of solar cell processing equipment so that we can manufacture 21,000 solar panels a day.

That's impressive.

That's fantastic.

I definitely think that solar is one of the better ways of, you know, kind of a green energy, if you want to call it that.

Solar is definitely one of the better green energy sources, right? And what First Solar does that's sort of unique, we're a U.S.-based manufacturer.

We started in Perrysburg, Ohio.

in my mind as the CTO is, has this problem that they're trying to solve been a limiting factor? Is it just something that, well, we have a way of doing it and maybe it could get better? Or is this a limiting factor that is preventing us from taking our designs to another level, taking our quality to another level? We think about scale.

I mean, the first solar project I built was a megawatt.

Now we build in the 500 megawatt ranges.

Yeah.

Here's what he told me.

So one of the things in our TerraFab today, you know, we were fortunate to work with some partners that have designed things for automation, which makes it easier for us to automate the module attachment process.

So are currently using the Series 7 module from First Solar.

And if you're not familiar with the Series 7, it has a unique architecture with two steel rails that nest onto brackets on the tracker torque tube.

So, I mean, this is, you know, all an issue here.

A lot of these companies, like think about First Solar.

The company is borrowing finance.

It's not even about the company itself.

The customer's finance, you know, this stuff too.

Financing costs are going higher here.

So I own First Solar in the long-term account too.

Buy good companies, reasonable valuations.

You often see that happen.

First Solar, SolarEdge Tech, Enphase Energy, all in the red, with First Solar being one of the biggest laggards in the S&P 500 and sinking to a new 52-week low.

Shares down 10%.

Scott.

Occidental Petroleum did one tenth of 1% on the day.

The sun shined on solar panel maker First Solar, added five and three tenths percent on the day.

Bonds up, yield on the 10-year T note backed off just a little bit, 4.93%.

You're listening to Marketplace.

So the chip stocks, are they a buy? Maybe, but they're under pressure.

And here, buy quality names because these are the list: Micron, Max Linear, AEHR, ICAR, Ultra Holdings, First Solar.

Again, they have great quant ratings, so comparative...

Micron, we talked about, uh, you know, valuation.