Guidance 

Following the cancellation of 6.6 GW of orders and glass supply chain disruptions, the management has revised its full-year 2025 net sales guidance from $4.9 billion to $5.7 billion on July 31, 2025, to now $4.95 billion to $5.20 billion. Operating income is expected to be between $1.56 billion and $1.68 billion, compared to $1.53 billion to $1.87 billion forecast earlier. Module sales guidance has also been changed from 16.7 GW to 19.3 GW previously to now between 16.7 GW and 17.4 GW (see First Solar’s Q2 2025 Net Sales Jump 30% Sequentially).  

Bookings 

Since last quarter, First Solar’s gross bookings in Q3 2025 rose by 2.7 GW with an ASP of 30.9 cents/W, reaching a total backlog of 54.5 GW, extending through 2030. It now sees potential booking opportunities of 79.2 GW, out of which 17.8 GW are mid-to-late stage, majorly in the US. 

Policy perspectives 

The company believes the various policy headwinds, including Section 232 investigation into polysilicon imports, antidumping and countervailing (AD/CVD) investigation into solar imports from India, Laos, and Indonesia, and India’s upcoming Approved List of Models and Manufacturers (ALMM) List-II for solar cells and similar measures for wafers in 2028, bode well for the non-Chinese solar supply chain.  

First Solar also shared an update into its TOPCon patent case. During the reporting quarter, it filed 3 separate filings with the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) seeking rejection of petitions filed by the affiliates of Canadian Solar, JinkoSolar, and Mundra to invalidate First Solar’s US TOPCon patents.

This follows the cadmium telluride (CdTe) manufacturer’s patent infringement investigations against several TOPCon manufacturers in 2024 (see First Solar Initiates Infringement Investigation).