First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR) Off 12%: ‘We’ve Decided To Move To Another Game

Palm Beach, FL 12/14/11 (StreetBeat) -- Shares of First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR) are down $5.42, almost 13%, at $37.15, and were at one point down 20%, after the company this morning cut its revenue outlook for this year, forecast this year’s and next year’s profit way below expectations, announced a restructuring involving layoffs, and said its chief accounting officer will leave the company.

All of that comes as the company tells the Street demand is falling in some large markets for solar energy. Hence, the solar stocks are responding accordingly, with SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWR) down 32 cents, or 5%, a5 $5.99, Yingli Green Energy (NYSE: YGE) down 18 cents, or almost 5%, at $3.70, and Trina Solar (NYSE: TSL) down 40 cents, or 6%, at $6.73. One of the few gainers in the pre-market is ReneSola (NYSE: SOL), up 3 cents, or 2%, at $1.58.

First Solar said it sees sales this year in a range of $2.8 billion to $2.9 billion, down from its prior forecast of $3 billion to $3.3 billion, and below the Street consensus of $3.2 billion. Profit per share is expected $5.75 to $6, below the average $6.88 estimate.

For 2012, the company sees revenue of $3.7 billion to $4 billion, and EPS of $3.75 to $4.25. That is below the consensus $4.1 billion and $7.42 per share.

Chairman and interim CEO Mike Ahearn said that the company was “recalibrating our business to focus on building and serving sustainable markets rather than pursuing subsidized markets,” from which he hoped to derive the majority of the company’s revenue by the end of 2014.

The company plans to lay of 100 people, a little over 1% of its workforce.

During a conference call following the results, Ahearn blamed changes in the industry on the development of “turnkey” silicon photovoltaic manufacturing, which he said had led to “relatively inexperienced and unskilled operators to quickly enter the supply chain and led to an explosion of production capacity in China and elsewhere,” hence creating a “fundamental structural change” in the polysilicon supply for solar panels.

The perversion of supply, and drastically falling prices, said Ahearn, meant that the subsidy program was in declining and would not come back in major solar markets: “the solar industry is structurally imbalanced. Production capacity is uncapped and growing, installation capacity is limited by subsidy levels and declining.”

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