JA Solar, has just issued a very bullish forecast for 2007 - a tripling of revenue and an increase in output to 100 megawatts from 75 in 2006. As I posted about the company last week, JA Solar has some great vertical integration going for it. And unlike some Chinese companies, this one has made some real effort to put together a website with clean lines and good english. Although I was a bit taken aback to read that they plan to have a production output of 175 MW by the 3rd quarter of 2007, when as per the report above the target was 100 Megawatts by end 2007. Scaling up solar power production is not easy - but to have one report in the press and another on your website cannot be correct.

I believe Forbes has got it wrong - but have emailed JA Solar to check as Reuters is reporting 175 MW like the company.

Hoku Scientific, the Hawaiian fuel cell membrane developer which unusually decided to morph into a solar company, has just signed a 99 year contract on 67 acres of land to build their silicon wafer fab. Given that US property prices are down about 10% of their peak, the company did well to wait until now.

Or maybe not !

Hoku Scientific is only going to an annual rent of $1 per year, for the next 99 years and they may even get another 450 acres.

When complete, the plant will produce 2000 metric tons of polysilicon per year. That the land is effectively being given to them will help a lot to offset what should be a headache for any energy intensive fab - Hawaii's staggeringly high electricity prices.

One of Hoku's clients for all this polysilicon will be Germany's Solar Fabrik, who like most solar module manufacturers, just can't get enough of the stuff.

JA Solar, has just been rated with an outperform by Stuart Bush of RBC Capital Markets.

A lot of solar companies suffer from a lack of vertical intergration with their silicon suppliers - but this cannot be said about JA Solar Holdings. Their mother company is Jing Long Group - the world's largest silicon wafer manufacturer - who supply JA with silicon wafers. Many people think that if anyone can make solar power cheap, it will be the Chinese manufacturers. And apparently, according to the same analyst, the manufacturing costs of JA Solar are half that of their European rivals - post raw material costs like silicon.

Since going public on February 9th earlier this year, JA Solar has spiked up a couple of times, just above and just below 20.

My general view is that there's a lot of pent-up interest in Chinese companies that stock exchanges have been slow to pick up on. So news that the Nasdaq Stock Market has appointed new management in Asia, seeking to boost listings by companies in China and elsewhere in the region has to be a step in the right direction.

Not least because I was surprised to learn the other day that it is not yet a legal requirement for a company listing on AIM to have a website. It would seem to me that to have a website is the bare minimum of information a company should provide to any potential investor, but apparently not.

This will however change as of 1st July.

Solarworld has on the face of it, just made a very innovative, shrewd move.

They have bought up a failing japanese silicon chip factory in Oregon, USA, for $40 million. The factory - or should we say Fab - had already had investment dollars haemorraged into it by Japan's Komatsu-Group; $794 million until the crash in chip prices made it financially unviable.

The deflation though in semiconductor prices has not been reflected in the solar pv market, where supply clearly cannot match demand. So Solarworld are going to convert the factory to a silicon wafer and cell production unit at a cost of $397 million. The future output of this converted solar plant has been put at 500 megawatts per year.

This reminds me of a conversation I had many years ago with a very successful entrepreneur - of all things in high-end bespoke wooden furniture - who shared with me his plans to buy a restaurant to entertain his clients and friends in. The key to owning a successful restaurant he said, was not to set it up yourself. Ideally, you buy a 2 year old restaurant that had just about failed. That way, someone else had haemorraged all the investment money on location, fittings, marketing, staff etc.

Just when they are at the point of collapse - because restaurants have such a high failure rate - this was the time to move in, buy it up for a song and get into the business. Apparently, all you really needed to then do was to invest in a good chef !

So there you go - like restaurants, semiconductor fabs are very, very expensive to build and the world is awash with them. Buying one off the shelf and converting it for your own purposes is potentially extremely clever. I suspect the rest of the solar world will be watching this experiment very closely and may already have started scouring redundant semiconductor fabs in Europe, Asia and the USA.