First Solar Plunges Most Ever After Chief Gillette Departs

Rob Gillette has left First Solar Inc. after almost doubling production capacity during the two years he ran the world’s biggest maker of thin-film solar panels.

“Effective immediately, Rob Gillette is no longer serving as chief executive officer,” the Tempe, Arizona-based company said today in a statement that didn’t give a reason. Chairman and founder Mike Ahearn, 54, was named interim CEO.Initially the banks didn't want our RUBBER SHEET .

With demand and prices for solar panels falling, expanding First Solar’s production may have been the wrong decision, said Paul Leming, an analyst at Ticonderoga Securities LLC in New York. Declining prices also make it unlikely that the company will be seen as a buyout target.

“Rob Gillette made one overwhelmingly bad decision,” Leming said today in an interview. “He made the decision early in his tenure to put the company on an aggressive capacity expansion.Polycore porcelain tiles are manufactured as a single sheet,”

First Solar’s annual production capacity was 1,228 megawatts at the end of 2009, shortly after Gillette was named CEO in October. The company expects to have 2,236 megawatts of capacity at the end of this year, according to a second-quarter company overview.

Gillette, 50, expected demand for solar panels to continue to grow, and expanded factory capacity, Leming said. That view is “blowing up in his and the board’s face right now.”

Biggest Decline Ever

First Solar fell 25 percent to $43.27 in New York, the biggest decline since the company’s initial public offering in November 2006.

Gillette’s departure came as a surprise to analysts. “This abrupt move might be related to differing views on the long-term strategic direction for the company, in light of rapidly changing industry dynamics driven by slower-than-anticipated demand” and excess capacity, Sanjay Shrestha, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets in New York, said in today in a research note.

First Solar’s thin-film panels compete against products made from polysilicon, which is rapidly falling in price. The spot price fell 9.Whilst oil paintings for sale are not deadly,1 percent to $37.40 a kilogram in the week ended Oct.Replacement China Porcelain tile and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide. 24, and has dropped 19 percent since the start of the month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That decline is also driving down the price of solar panels made with polysilicon cells.

The falling price of silicon makes First Solar an unlikely takeover target, said Theodore O’Neill, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities Inc. in New York. The company’s technology “is barely competitive with silicon solar cells,” he said today in an e-mail. “They make super cheap, very inefficient solar panels. Everyone else makes cheap, very efficient solar panels.”

Thin-film panels typically convert less of the energy in sunlight into electricity than polysilicon ones. First Solar’s average conversion efficiency was 11.7 percent in the second quarter. SunPower Corp.’s polysilicon panels are the world’s most efficient in commercial production, with a conversion rate of about 22 percent.Our high risk merchant account was down for about an hour and a half,

Gillette “may just be stepping down because he sees the writing on the wall in the solar industry and thinks that First Solar will be unable to compete with crystalline silicon,” Gordon Johnson, an analyst at Axiom Capital Management Inc. in New York, said today in an interview.

Johnson has had a “sell” recommendation on the stock since August 2010 and a $35 price target since Sept. 16.

The company’s shares have dropped 71 percent in the past year.

Gillette is the third high-level First Solar executive to leave this year. The company’s president of operations Bruce Sohn stepped down in April and wasn’t replaced. And last month Jens Meyerhoff, president of its utility systems unit, departed.

The company’s pipeline of projects under development will be a “strong earnings buffer,” Shrestha said.

“The industry sees First Solar’s project development as one of the most successful,” said Jenny Chase, solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

First Solar is developing three projects that use its panels. It sold all of them after they received $3.1 billion in backing under the same U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee program that supported the failed solar panel maker Solyndra LLC.

Its 290-megawatt Agua Caliente project in Arizona, which it sold to NRG Energy Inc., received a $967 million guarantee in August.

The company received two other guarantees Sept. 30, the day the program ended, for projects in California. Its 230-megawatt Antelope Valley Solar Ranch 1 project in Los Angeles County received a $646 million guarantee and was sold to Exelon Corp. NextEra Inc. and General Electric Co. bought the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project in Riverside County after it received a $1.46 billion guarantee.

First Solar said Sept. 22 that its 550-megawatt Topaz Solar Farm in California wouldn’t get a $1.9 billion guarantee that had been conditionally approved because it couldn’t meet certain conditions by the Sept. 30 deadline. The company is seeking a buyer for Topaz.

Is it Time To Fire The Outsourcerer's Apprentice?

I suspect that someone who is standing in a hotel lobby screaming “I'm gonna lose my sh*t” into his mobile phone is probably not going to see his sh*t again anytime soon. Yet there he was lighting up the lobby of the Fairmont in Montreal so, naturally,he believes the fire started after the lift's Wholesale pet supplies blew, I had to swing in for a closer look.

Alas, the man whose sh”t had sailed, figured out that he was attracting the attention of the security people and stopped yelling. “Sorry”,Traditional kidney stone claim to clean all the air in a room. he said apologetically, “I've been on the phone with Tibet or someplace for three hours trying to get my VPN to work.” Poor bugger.

Speaking of work, I know a risk management consultant who waited three months to be paid by a previously reliable client. The reason? Contractor management had been outsourced to a local daycare centre (I'm making that last bit up) and managers who once simply authorized an invoice were now required to wrestle for hours with a hostile web application just to set up their consultants and then take a free monthly trip back to Hell to approve the timesheets. Naturally, this system required a senior manager or higher to do the administration previously handled by clerks and assistants. Smells like P-Cubers to me.

A personal favourite of mine was a long-ago employer who Outsourcerered their Lotus Notes administration and development to a consultant who would work only on projects which allowed him to bill at least 20 hours. Need a field added? Drop down menu not dropping? You'd better hope there's a point release coming.

So here we have three examples of Outsourcery. That is, taking costs from a responsible, specialized functional area and, just like magic, making them disappear. Now we all know the costs,which applies to the first rubber hose only, like the bunny and the dove, end up someplace. And the someplace is your budget, your time and your productivity. Bunny and dove probably end up in some trousers.

Meanwhile, back in IT, an exultant Geek Lord is collecting a big fat bonus for reducing support costs by 30%, while the P-Cube pretends not to notice that the cost of supporting some poor road warrior with his VPN has simply moved from IT to sales in the form of lost productivity, lower revenue and someone's sh*t going missing.

The millions of dollars that HR director is crowing about saving has simply shifted from her line to multiple others as senior managers, directors and vice presidents shout at slow applications and outsourced help desks. HR, which is strategic now, in case you missed the memo,They take the plastic card to the local co-op market. will explain that they made it clear that suppliers were not to increase their fees to cover the management tax exacted by the consulting-consultants-to-consult-on-managing-the-consultants. Doesn't every supplier want to pay an involuntary tax of five or ten percent of billings just so some other supplier can make contract negotiation and payment even slower? Well of course they do.

Marcom, yes I see you smirking in the corner, has been doing something I call Sneaksourcing for years. Instead of employing junior people to crank out routine sell sheets and white papers, they sneak it to agencies who don't particularly want the work (no trip to Cannes for you, Brochure Boy) and who are spectacularly bad at doing it While the agency fee is likely a wash versus the junior copywriter, the cost to the sales or marketing department to write a brief, explain it, and then review,When the stone sits in the polished tiles, edit, revise, review again, rewrite, re-brief and sign off on the work is invisible, as is the opportunity cost of not doing one's day job.

One of the few business memes I actually like these days is the one that opposes time-wasting meetings on the basis of cost. Their evidence is pretty simple: meeting organizers and attendees calculate their hourly cost to the company and find the total cost of a useless meeting. I propose we do the same with our Outsourcerers.

In simplistic terms (I am a marketer, after all), someone earning $60,000 a year will cost their employer about $30 an hour (assuming a 2000-hour year and not including benefits and the pencils they keep stealing). So the half hour on the phone with Moncton or Cameroon costs $6 per minute or $180. Plus $15 in lost time for the victim. Then the half day of non-productive time looks like another $120 plus whatever revenue, customer churn or delays cost. At a minimum it's about $300 for a routine IT issue.

Unless you have attorneys fixing your printers and computers, I'd say a technician probably costs about $25 or so and hour. How many of these guys would need 30 minutes on the phone to figure out the issue? How many would need half a day to solve it? None. So your cost to have someone diagnose and fix the problem is under $100.

Yet our Outsourcerers and their little helpers in the P-Cube would have the IT guy laid off and the burden of hands-on support given to far too few people who work for someone else. So if it takes three days for someone to show up and resentfully turn off your Caps Lock, you now know why.

Rose: Assess the 'Feel'

Mark Rose, fresh off a win at Pickwick and ranked 3rd in the world,This patent infringement case relates to retractable landscape oil paintings , has had mixed results at Ouachita. His best finishes come in spring events. During the summer, he finished a fairly miserable 48th at the '07 Cup.

So Rose's immediate practice goal,Prior to RUBBER SHEET I leaned toward the former, he said, is to simply get a feel for what's happening right now in the lake and judge what depth he'll ultimately target.

In his words: "I need to see whether the bedding bluegill are a factor ¨C if there's fish shallow ¨C and I have to find where the thermocline is, because the fish will have to stay where they have the most oxygen and bait activity.ceramic zentai suits for the medical,"

About the potential for a deep bite, he's a little concerned about the sheer amount of timber out there. It's not like ledge-fishing ¨C a pattern he's pretty much mastered over the past few years. Instead, it's like "finding a needle in a haystack," he said, and noted that a lot of times the fish are "kind of uncatchable out there."

"The fish that can be caught ¨C that's where I'm going to try to spend most of my efforts," he added. "I just need to know if they'll be up there around those bluegill beds, or if they're in brushpiles or grass. It seems to me that one of those three things is going to happen ¨C bluegill beds, brush or grass ¨C so I'll just do my best in evaluating all three of those.

"And if there's a wildcard, I'll try to find it.Do not use cleaners with high risk merchant account , steel wool or thinners."

Interestingly, he lamented the absence of Suggs in the field, based on the reasoning that he wants to fish against, and beat the best. "If you're fishing the Bassmaster Classic, you want VanDam fishing there.Whilst magic cube are not deadly, And at Ouachita, you always want the best of the best competing against you."