Chinese Companies Prefer Dying to Being Bought, JinkoSolar Says - Bloomberg

Chinese solar-panel makers, which supply more than half the world market, will respond to the supply glut by shutting factories or their entire businesses rather than merging, a JinkoSolar Holding Co. (JKS) official said. The weakest companies should “weed out” about 75 percent of output capacity so that China has a “reasonable” 20 gigawatts compared with 75 gigawatts estimated by the second quarter of 2013, Zhang Longgen, chief financial officer of the Shanghai-based solar module maker, said in a Jan. 4 telephone interview. “We won’t see many mergers and acquisitions at home,” Zhang said. “Many Chinese companies are more willing to die rather than be bought because it is against their culture to be acquired.”The remarks by JinkoSolar, the eighth-biggest producer, shed light on how China may deal with a global oversupply that it helped provoke by accelerating factory expansion an