Global PV Market Hits New Installation Highs in 2025; China Maintains Global Leadership Amid Industrial Restructuring

The China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA) released its annual flagship report 2025 Global and China PV Industry Development Report, outlining the industry’s performance, structural adjustments, challenges and long-term development trends amid accelerating global carbon neutrality initiatives.

The global photovoltaic sector achieved robust capacity expansion in 2025 with notable structural divergence across manufacturing links. While global polysilicon and module capacity continued to grow at a moderated pace, wafer and cell production capacities witnessed a contraction. Despite a profound industrial correction in China, the country retained its dominant position in the global PV market, underpinned by solid advantages in crystalline silicon technology and cost control. Driven by worldwide carbon neutrality targets, renewable energy deployment has evolved into a global consensus, fueling sustained demand for solar power.

Global PV new installations reached a record high of 580GW in 2025, lifting the cumulative installed capacity to 2,656GW. China led the global market with 316.57GW of newly installed PV capacity, a year-on-year increase of 14.05%, exceeding the total new installations recorded during China’s 13th Five-Year Plan period. Emerging markets maintained strong growth, with India’s new PV additions surging 49.4% year on year to 36.6GW.

Affected by supply-demand mismatches, fluctuating supply chain prices and a complex external environment, China’s PV manufacturing output experienced periodic declines across all industrial segments in 2025, with polysilicon and module sectors seeing the most pronounced drops. Technological advancement continued to gather momentum: N-type silicon wafers have fully replaced traditional P-type products as the mainstream market choice, and the mass-production conversion efficiency of mainstream battery technologies achieved steady improvements.

Domestic PV installation trends showed obvious policy-driven volatility. A installation boom occurred in the first half of 2025, driven by updated distributed PV management policies, with a single-month new installation record of 92.92GW in May. Market demand cooled off sharply after the policy window period before a gradual recovery starting from September. In terms of installation structure, centralized PV systems accounted for 51.7% of the total, remaining the primary form; industrial and commercial distributed PV took up 33.8%, posting three consecutive years of steady growth, while residential distributed PV rebounded notably to 14.5%.

China’s PV product exports registered a total value of USD 29.356 billion in 2025, down 8% year on year, with the decline narrowing significantly compared with the previous year. Volumes of exported silicon wafers, cells and modules all rose year on year, with battery exports seeing the most striking growth. Notably, China’s module exports hit a new historic high for the ninth consecutive year. The export landscape became increasingly diversified, reducing reliance on single overseas markets and balancing growth between traditional and emerging regions.

Industrial chain prices trended downward with fluctuations in the first half of 2025 and stabilized and rebounded in the second half. By December, the price indices of polysilicon, silicon wafers, solar cells and modules rose by 42.9%, 1.4%, 13.4% and 2.1% year on year respectively.

The industry also faced mounting operational pressures amid in-depth restructuring. Lower manufacturing output compressed corporate profit margins, forcing small and medium-sized PV enterprises into operational difficulties and accelerating industrial consolidation. The core PV industrial chain still maintains a relatively high asset-liability ratio. CPIA suggested that enterprises strengthen cash flow management, accelerate technological innovation to build core competitiveness, optimize overseas capacity layout to mitigate market risks, and expand integrated "PV+" application scenarios to foster new growth drivers.

Looking ahead, solar energy will dominate global clean energy expansion. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that solar power will account for 80% of global new clean energy installations by 2030. CPIA forecasts that global annual new PV installations will reach 725–870GW during China’s 15th Five-Year Plan period, while China’s annual new PV capacity will stand at 238–287GW.

The PV industry will shift from the extensive development model of scale expansion and price competition to high-quality development driven by value competition. Technological innovation will focus on the mass production of silver-free and low-silver technologies, as well as the industrialization of perovskite and tandem solar cells. Digital and intelligent tools including AI quality inspection and digital twin technology will be widely applied to optimize manufacturing processes. The industry will advance green production by realizing "green manufacturing with green energy" and incorporate green value into PV product evaluation standards. Integrated applications such as PV coupling with hydrogen/ammonia/alcohol production and data centers will be further expanded.

As global trade complexities intensify, China’s PV industry will fully enter a market-driven era after the complete cancellation of PV export tax rebates in April 2026. To adapt to the new landscape, enterprises are advised to align overseas deployment with national strategies including the Belt and Road Initiative, adopt diversified operational models to export industry standards, testing and certification services, and build a hybrid layout of sole proprietorship, joint venture and OEM production to prevent core technology leakage and defuse global market risks.