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First Solar reported third-quarter 2026 net sales of $1.23 billion, a 58% gross margin and $571 million in net income, according to pv magazine USA. The company also authorized a new $500 million stock buyback.
Net sales fell 23% year over year on lower volumes of modules sold to third parties, while gross margin was roughly 20 percentage points above the year-earlier figure and net income rose 25% year over year.
Citing the sales slowdown, First Solar cut its full-year volume forecast to between 16.0 GW and 17.0 GW and lowered its 2026 net sales guidance to a range of $4.6 billion to $4.9 billion, down from the $4.9 billion to $5.2 billion it gave after the second quarter.
The company ended the quarter with a contracted backlog of 44 GW valued at about $13.5 billion, with deliveries scheduled through 2030. Since its second-quarter update it recorded 1.4 GW of U.S. bookings at an average selling price of about 36 cents per watt.
CFO Alex Bradley said the company intends to avoid the spot market for its international volume and is shifting toward project-specific contracts with defined delivery schedules, rather than the multi-year framework agreements covering multiple projects for very large customers that First Solar has used. He said project-based contracting supports more efficient operational planning and reduces working capital needs and warehousing costs, even though it slows the pace at which multi-year backlog is added.
CEO Mark Widmar described the August Section 232 proclamation as a meaningful shift for U.S. solar manufacturing and said nearly 80% of First Solar’s global manufacturing footprint will be in the United States by 2027. He said the company, which he described as the only fully integrated utility-scale solar manufacturer without dependence on a Chinese crystalline silicon supply chain, considers itself structurally positioned to benefit from the changed environment.
The company nonetheless said near-term procurement and price discovery have slowed. Widmar cited developers holding back on module procurement for 2029 and 2030 amid interconnection challenges and local opposition to data center deployment, pending guidance on Foreign Entity of Concern rules, and uncertainty over enforcement of Section 232 minimum import prices and anti-stockpiling rules.
Those pressures have weighed most on international Series 6 production in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam facility is slated to supply semi-finished Series 6 modules to the newly inaugurated South Carolina finishing plant, while the Malaysia factory continues to produce finished international modules. Widmar said First Solar expects a binary operational decision on the Malaysia facility in the first half of 2027: run it at full or near-full capacity, or shut production. Because Malaysian modules do not qualify for U.S. Section 45X manufacturing tax credits and face freight and tariff costs, the company does not expect either outcome to materially affect its run-rate earnings profile.
Just before the earnings call, First Solar announced a non-exclusive patent licensing agreement with perovskite company CubicPV, adding rights to its existing agreement with Oxford PV. The company plans to begin producing Series 6-form-factor perovskite modules for field testing and durability validation at its Perrysburg, Ohio facility in the first half of 2027.
On the call, executives also addressed a forthcoming decision on the 1.8 GW Malaysia factory, perovskite investments, the cost position of upcoming modules built on its CuRe technology against crystalline silicon PERC and TOPCon competitors, ongoing TOPCon intellectual property disputes and a warranty lawsuit filed by developer Swift Current Energy. Widmar said First Solar will soon file its formal legal response in the Swift Current case and maintained that its warranty terms govern any remediation, saying the company will support obligations within its limited liability warranty but not remedies sought outside those parameters.
Interactive table based on the Store Companies dataset for this report.
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Major US solar manufacturer
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Former Cree LED business
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