The U.S. International Commission (ITC) announced on September 22 (local time) that it has accepted Suniva’s petition to seek relief against all solar imports under Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act. Following the affirmation of Suniva’s claim, ITC will develop recommendations to safeguard the U.S. solar market against imports from Asia. EnergyTrend, TrendForce’s green energy research division, states that ITC’s ruling is expected to raise the solar trade barrier significantly and may slash the U.S. photovoltaic (PV) demand for the whole 2018 by half.
HTC announced on September 21 that the company’s R&D and engineering unit that is responsible for Google’s Pixel smartphones will be officially joining Google. This deal to acquire of HTC’s talents and assets related to smartphone manufacturing is worth a total of US$1.1 billion. Below is a brief analysis of this deal by TrendForce and a table showing this year’s quarterly production volumes of Google and HTC branded smartphones. Hopefully, our research will be useful to you as a reference should you decide to report on this event.