China's Top Five Solar Giants to Cut Another 40,000 Jobs in 2025 as Overcapacity Persists
nashnova research
LONGi, Trina, JinkoSolar, JA Solar and Tongwei shed over 40,000 workers in 2025, halving their combined headcount in two years; yet industry capacity still doubles global demand, and losses keep deepening.
How deep are the cuts? What does halving headcount in two years mean?
The five firms ended 2025 with 154,061 employees — down 40,589, or roughly 21%, from the year before.
That follows a 31% drop in 2024. Combined, they have shed about half their workforce in two years.
This means → this is not a one-off restructuring but a sustained, two-year contraction — a sign the industry's problems are far from over.
How bad is the overcapacity? Why do they keep expanding while losing money?
China's solar capacity now equals roughly twice global demand — and is still growing.
Average module prices across the five makers fell from $350 per kilowatt in 2019 to $130 in 2025 — a drop of more than 60% in six years.
Average EBIT margin — earnings before interest and tax as a share of revenue — worsened from -8% in 2024 to -13%.
In plain terms = every panel sold loses money, and the more they sell, the deeper the losses. Scale is not helping; it is hurting.
Can cost-cutting save the industry? What do analysts say?
Jefferies analyst Alan Lau argues that when firms cannot even cover gross profit, cutting costs only means "losing less," not turning around.
This means → layoffs and belt-tightening treat the symptom, not the cause — the real problem is too much capacity, not too many workers.
He sees only two paths to a fast shakeout: "Either push industry-wide M&A, or wait for some shock that wipes out half the capacity overnight."
A polysilicon-led upstream consolidation plan launched last year collapsed due to insufficient industry support.
Is demand shrinking too?
China shifted its renewable-energy subsidy from a fixed-return model to market-based competitive bidding, dampening appetite for new solar installations.
Jefferies expects China's new solar capacity in 2026 to fall to 150–200 GW, well below the record 315 GW added in 2025.
Chinese solar-cell and module exports dropped 10% year-on-year by volume in the first eight months of this year.
This reflects a double squeeze: oversupply on one side, contracting demand on the other.
When does the industry actually hit bottom?
Morningstar analyst Cheng Wang believes the industry may have reached the cyclical trough, but warns that layoffs likely continued beyond the 2025 reporting period.
New energy-efficiency standards for polysilicon, wafers and module performance take effect on January 1, 2027 — capacity that fails to meet them faces forced exit.
In plain terms = the 2027 rules are the nearest "clearing event" the market is watching. Whether they actually push out sub-standard capacity will determine when this deep freeze ends.
市场有风险，内容仅供研究参考，不构成投资建议。