pv magazine: The restructuring of Singulus' corporate debt would see it swapped for shares in the company. Why is this required?Stefan Rinck: In order to secure the viability of the company on a sustainable basis and to make the strategic positioning successful, at first the restructuring of the capital structure of the company is required. This is because the current capital structure limits us in the financing of growth. The restructuring of the capital structure will lead to a debt-free company and we will be well positioned for the expansion of our activities in new markets.Beyond this, how would you say Singulus is situated in 2015 to turn around the losses sustained in 2014?I would like to provide a little bit of background as to why we are where we are and why we showed this figures which are not very good. 2014 was difficult for us because we had in all of our business areas not enough business. First of all our Blu-ray disc business, which is still a very important part of the company, dropped by 90% and this is difficult to overcome. For this year we will see some improvements in the Blu-ray business, but maybe not as good as 2013, but better than 2014. When it comes to solar that was also not very successful last year. Throughout the industry we expected rather steep increases or improvements in the overall situation because demand is increasing for solar modules and the production capacity is not matching the demand, so there is no overcapacity left anymore. We all expected new order income last year for the equipment manufacturers, but this was still missing and we had to wait until the end of last year and the beginning of this year for the new wave to come in the solar market and a new investment cycle. This is something that now makes us a little bit more optimistic for this year. We have seen some nice order intakes in the first two months, so that is why we are now much more optimistic. Looking at solar, what are the areas of production that you are most optimistic about? We have seen a lot of activity in the PERC space of late for tool suppliers. There are different areas. As you know we are an equipment supplier for special coating machines and wet chemistry treatment machines and we see good opportunities in many different areas. When it comes to CIGS we have received some nice orders at the beginning of this year from Hanergy in China. Hanergy began at the end of last year to build up a huge production capacity for CIGS in China and we received an order for our wet chemistry coating machine, the chemical bath deposition for the buffer layer, and we also picked up an order for sputtering machines to coat certain materials onto the glass.We also see some other customers moving forward with CIGS and starting to think about new investments in that area. So I would say CIGS is really something where we will see in the near future growing production capacity around the world. The other area is PERC, as you mention. We have some orders for aluminum oxide coating in that area. That is where we see customers investing in the upgrade of existing production lines to improve the overall efficiency. But that is only an intermediate stage. In the long term we see some interesting investments going forward in terms ...Den vollständigen Artikel lesen ...