Thailand & Indonesia to drive South East Asia PV market

The report, which analyses the PV markets in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore and Philippines, reveals that the region will grow at 50 percent per year on average over the next five years, providing an attractive market for ailing suppliers in Europe. Installations have previously been dominated by Thailand, however, other regions are also forecast to quickly and account for significant share of the market. The new report, The PV Market in South East Asia found that although the region accounted for less than one percent of global installations in 2011, IMS Research forecasts that its share will increase by more than four times by 2016. Annual Installations are forecast to grow by 50 percent a year on average for the next five years and exceed 1GW by 2015. In recent years, Thailand has accounted for the majority of installations in the region and will be the fifth largest market in Asia in 2012 (after China, Japan, India and Australia). Rapid growth in Thailand has been driven by the attractive ‘adder’ incentive scheme which has resulted in several large ground-mount systems being completed. However, a new incentive scheme to promote smaller roof-top systems is expected in 2013. As a result, the market share of utility-scale systems in Thailand is forecast to fall by 25 percent by 2016. The PV market in Southeast Asia is forecast to diversify significantly in the future. “Although the market is currently dominated by Thailand, a number of countries within the South East Asia region have huge potential for PV and offer significant opportunities to suppliers, and these will account for a growing share of the market in the future,” commented Jessica Jin, PV market analyst at IMS Research. “Given its substantial and quickly growing need for electricity, the small amount of the population that currently have access to electricity, and its reliance on diesel generators on its thousands of islands, PV is an highly attractive solution for providing distributed electricity sources in Indonesia.” The report predicts that Indonesia will be the fastest growing market in the region installing close to 1GW of PV over the next four years, with off-grid systems set to account for a significant share of this. The report also found that although the region is home to some large manufacturing facilities for Western PV cell and module manufacturers, these manufacturers do not hold a significant market share, and five of the largest PV module suppliers to the region were found to be Chinese or Japanese manufacturers. In contrast, the majority of the largest system integrators were headquartered locally.