Swiss-owned solar manufacturer Meyer Burger has raised CHF206.75 million (US$228 million) following the closure of its rights offering. The offering was announced in February and clarified last month.
The funds, which were provided through the issuance of 20,144,423,886 new shares, will go towards Meyer Burger’s US expansion, where it is building a 2GW module production facility in Arizona and a 2GW cell manufacturing plant in Colorado Springs. Both sites will produce heterojunction technology (HJT) products.
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Following the procedure of the rights issue, Meyer Burger said that 97.54% of the available shares were taken up through subscription rights offered to existing shareholders. These rights granted existing shareholders one new share for every share they already owned, and the option to subscribe for up to 28 shares if five subscription rights were exercised.
The company’s largest shareholder, Sentis Capital, purchased 3.276 million shares at CHF32.7 million (US$36 million). This represented all of its subscription rights and an additional 1.186 million offered shares.
On top of the 97.54% of shares taken up through subscription rights, Meyer Burger said that it had placed “all 496,302,442 new shares for which subscription rights were not exercised during the subscription period with various institutional investors.”
The first trading day on the Swiss Exchange for these new shares is expected tomorrow (5 April).
Meyer Burger is moving its manufacturing base across the Atlantic, following the favourable incentives for clean energy equipment manufacturing under the US’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the relative lack of support for manufacturers in Europe. The company announced the closure of its module production facility in Freiburg, Germany in January.
Largely as a result of this upheaval, Meyer Burger closed 2023 with a net loss of US$330 million. The company said that it manufactured just 650MW of its total 1.4GW of module production capacity over the year.
At the time of the results, Franz Richter, chairman, and Gunter Erfurt, CEO of Meyer Burger made a joint statement: “As the year progressed, it became clear that dumping prices from Chinese suppliers in Europe, coupled with a sharp rise in Chinese production overcapacity and a lack of market protection, led to unprecedented distortions in the European solar market, which had a serious impact on Meyer Burger’s earnings.”
