Took the global top spot, posted a loss of 3 billion yuan in half a year, the entrepreneur from Jiangxi "relinquished power"

A half-year report that ranks first in global shipments but records a book loss of over 3 billion yuan, a convertible bond whose conversion price has been revised downward twice within one year, and a full-year shipment target cut have made JinkoSolar's performance in the first half of the year particularly eye-catching.

On September 3, the RMB 10 billion convertible bond it previously issued continued to revise its conversion price downward, aiming to ease the pressure of maturity redemption; not long ago, it just lowered its full-year shipment target from 75-85GW to 60-70GW.

What is more difficult to interpret than the financial statements is the sudden change in the power landscape.

In March, JinkoSolar, the A-share listed company, revised its articles of association for the first time, adding the clause that "a vice chairman can be set up". Chen Kangping, a veteran figure in the "Iron Triangle", resigned as general manager and took this position. Cao Haiyun with a financial background, Jiang Rui who came from a brokerage firm, and Chang Chen, the post-85s financial director, all joined the core management team. Just four months later, Chen Kangping completely resigned from his position and withdrew from the listed company entirely. The highlight on August 26 was that Li Xiande, the founder of the company, resigned as CEO of JKS, the New York Stock Exchange listed entity, and was succeeded by Du Wei, who has a background in strategic investment.

Many media comments said that for JinkoSolar and Li Xiande, this set of combined punches may mean that the years-long obsession with "global No.1" has loosened.

Li Xiande is known as a "tough guy". During the photovoltaic crisis in 2009, he spent 300 million yuan in a week to buy the dip; in 2023, he invested tens of billions of yuan to rush the TOPCon (Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact) production capacity, thus becoming the richest man in Jiangxi Province... He believes in reverse philosophy — the more the market is in a downturn, the more confident you should be.

But this summer, he has repeatedly "stepped on the brakes".

China Entrepreneur learned from JinkoSolar that this personnel change is a planned management handover to facilitate the founder to focus on long-term strategic layout.

Source: Visual China

JinkoSolar, which is still advancing aggressively in recent years, is an extreme sample of this photovoltaic winter. In 2025, the company ended its 12-year consecutive profit record, with a net loss attributable to shareholders of 6.882 billion yuan. Entering 2026, the bleeding has not stopped — in addition to the poor revenue and profit data, financial expenses surged 589% year-on-year to 1.546 billion yuan, exchange losses became a "new black hole" on the income statement, and its asset-liability ratio has reached as high as 76.17%.

However, the two listed companies completed the reshuffle of the core management line in the same period, and the new helmsmen are not from the traditional manufacturing industry, which inevitably makes the industry speculate that Li Xiande is going to make major adjustments to his business strategy.

Cao Haiyun, who took office not long ago, clearly stated in an exclusive interview in June that in the next three years, JinkoSolar will "firmly not follow the trend of low-price scale involution", and shift the strategic priority from expanding production scale to "in-depth technological breakthroughs, large-scale coordination of solar and energy storage, and global resilience upgrading". By actively lowering the shipment guidance, the company even put "profit, cash flow and order quality" before scale.

The international market is becoming more complex, and JinkoSolar's overseas revenue accounts for more than 75%, which was originally its biggest confidence to get rid of the involution in the domestic market. However, as markets such as the United States strengthen compliance control over Chinese photovoltaics, and exchange rates fluctuate, the cost risk of heavy assets has increased accordingly. Many shareholders are puzzled, and someone on Xueqiu asked: The overseas proportion and gross profit margin are both at a high level, why is there such a large loss?

This is not a difficult question to answer, but it does require a solution. Judging from the half-year report, the answer given by JinkoSolar is energy storage — up to now, the signed energy storage orders are about 5GWh, high-potential orders are 5.3GWh, and reserve orders exceed 20GWh. Estimated at market prices, this is an income source with a scale of tens of billions of yuan.

But this is not enough for Li Xiande to break out of the logic of the manufacturing industry. Some industry observers pointed out that JinkoSolar is caught in a dangerous paradox — to get rid of losses, it must reduce costs and improve efficiency; to reduce costs and improve efficiency, it must increase R&D investment, which will exacerbate cash flow pressure in the short term.

Moreover, all manufacturing companies involved in overseas business face the same challenge — the non-operational risk of exchange rate management may be more difficult to tame than the price war in the main business, and the difficulty has been increasing in recent years.

From this perspective, Li Xiande is not "stopping". Changing leaders on both A-share and US stock markets, family members retreating from the front line of operation, financial professional managers taking over both platforms, and the strategic weight of energy storage business being greatly increased — these actions point to, perhaps not a retreat, but a systematic reconstruction from the top-level power structure to the financial operation logic.

However, when "the first shipment volume" can no longer prevent losses, whether his new script can work is still an unanswered question.

01

Reshaping the power structure?

To understand the meaning of Li Xiande's "stepping back half a step", we have to go back to his history of starting a business.

In the photovoltaic industry, the first impression the outside world has of him is a refined Jiangxi "scholar" who loves writing essays, but he is called a daring "tough guy" by his peers — his contrasting and wild business style is widely spread.

Li Xiande showed his sensitivity to capital very early. In 2007, he "used the chicken to lay eggs", receiving nearly 200 million yuan in advance payments from downstream customers, and immediately expanded his production capacity. He continued to expand the following year: in May, he obtained 35 million US dollars from a Singaporean private equity fund; in August, he obtained more than 20 million US dollars from institutions such as Shenzhen Venture Capital.

But after getting the money, he suddenly calmed down. After seeing the figures of "polysilicon demand increased by 30% while supply surged by 120%", he took the initiative to step on the brakes. Then, during the large-scale photovoltaic industry reshuffle affected by the US subprime mortgage crisis, he escaped the disaster with a huge amount of cash in hand.

In 2009, when more than half of the photovoltaic enterprises were still stuck in the mire, Li Xiande only spent a week to acquire the first photovoltaic enterprise in Haining, Zhejiang — Sun Valley Energy, with nearly 300 million yuan. The cell production lines owned by this company just filled the gap of JinkoSolar from silicon wafers to cells.

The next year, he took JinkoSolar to list on the New York Stock Exchange, becoming the first Chinese photovoltaic enterprise listed in the United States after the financial crisis, and raised 70 million US dollars.

After this battle, Li Xiande and JinkoSolar became famous throughout the industry.

Later, while heavily investing in Europe and the United States, he also entered Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, making JinkoSolar the most aggressive photovoltaic company in global expansion; in addition, he took the lead in betting on monocrystalline silicon, raising the production capacity to the first echelon of the industry before the industry was still hesitating between monocrystalline silicon and polycrystalline silicon, and reached the top of global module shipments at one stroke.

After establishing the market scale, Li Xiande's capital movements became more intensive.

In 2020, after the "dual carbon" goal was proposed, domestic market demand grew rapidly. JinkoSolar, which was only listed overseas, could not raise funds as fast as its domestic competitors, and its shipment volume was overtaken by LONGi Green Energy, even falling to the fourth place in 2021.

Li Xiande's choice was to spin off his main operating subsidiary, Jiangxi JinkoSolar, to list on the A-share market. At that time, some investment bankers said that compared with the path of privatization and delisting before returning to A-shares, spinning off part of the assets would greatly shorten the whole process. But this corresponds to the subsequent governance problems of the "parent-subsidiary" structure, the asset value discount caused by "incomplete" assets, and potential regulatory and compliance risks.

But he just wanted to save time. In 2022, the A-share photovoltaic sector was in a boom period. After JinkoSolar landed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, its market value exceeded 100 billion yuan on the first day.

Source: AI Generated

The financing channels were completely opened. By August 2023, JinkoSolar had carried out three huge financings, with a total scale of nearly 30 billion yuan. Li Xiande then proposed "All In" TOPCon, recaptured the first place in global module shipments in 2023, and became the richest man in Jiangxi with a personal net worth of 35.3 billion yuan.

JinkoSolar's dual listing structure of "US stock + A-share" is very rare in the photovoltaic industry.

In essence, the US stock market is its "birthplace". With the logic of exchanging technology for financing, it completed the A-share listing — some media called this a kind of "arbitrage", using mature overseas technology to exchange for high valuation and low-cost capital in the domestic capital market.

But in the current environment, the disadvantages of this structure are becoming more and more obvious. The most intuitive result is that JinkoSolar's financial expenses in the first half of the year were as high as 1.546 billion yuan, a year-on-year surge of nearly 6 times, mainly dragged down by exchange losses.

JinkoSolar's overseas revenue proportion is still growing, exceeding 75%. When the exchange rate fluctuates, the foreign currency assets on the books will generate floating changes.

What is more fatal is that frictions in overseas markets are escalating day by day. First Solar, a US photovoltaic enterprise, filed a "337 Investigation" application with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), listing 47 leading global photovoltaic enterprises including JinkoSolar as defendants, pointing to core patent infringement of TOPCon cells, among which 8 JinkoSolar-related entities were included in the list.

The photovoltaic industry has reached the moment when the capital blood bar is "almost empty". How to allocate the overseas assets that used to be the source of profit so as not to drag down the performance has become a top priority.

Du Wei, the newly appointed CEO of JinkoSolar's US stock platform at this time, is obviously more professional in "capital". He is not from the traditional manufacturing industry, holds a master's degree in finance, and his past resume focuses on capital allocation and investor relations — he once served as executive general manager of investor relations at Fosun Yuyuan Co., Ltd.; in 2021, he joined the JinkoSolar system, successively serving as chairman assistant, general manager of strategic investment, and vice president of strategic investment.

For Li Xiande, on the one hand, there is the uncertainty of the overseas market, and on the other hand, it is the critical period of technical confrontation between BC (Back Contact) and TOPCon in the domestic market. The strategic choice at this time will determine the life and death of JinkoSolar.

His "stepping back half a step" is more like risk avoidance — the tricky front line of the US stock market is handed over to more professional professional managers, and the core position he wants to hold is the A-share base camp loaded with industrial assets.

02

"Retreat to Advance"

JinkoSolar's situation in China really requires a major reorganization.

The primary task is "debt reduction". On September 3, JinkoSolar held an interim shareholder meeting to revise the conversion price downward, further lowering it from 6.35 yuan/share to 4.36 yuan/share.

This is the "Jinkang Convertible Bond" with a scale of 10 billion yuan issued in 2023, which is used for the construction of projects such as annual production of 11GW high-efficiency cells, 8GW highly automated modules, 20GW rod pulling and square cutting, and supplementing working capital. This convertible bond was regarded as the largest capital operation after JinkoSolar's return to A-shares at that time.

Including the 56GW vertical integration project of the "Shanxi Large Base", and the tens of billions of yuan projects in Haining, Zhejiang and Shangrao, Jiangxi, JinkoSolar invested huge sums of money in TOPCon only in the first half of 2023.

Source: AI Generated

But the subsequent cold winter period turned a series of capital operations into a heavy historical burden. Last year, the conversion price of "Jinkang Convertible Bond" had been revised downward from 13.48 yuan/share to 6.35 yuan/share. The intention is very clear: JinkoSolar encourages holders to convert their bonds into shares, so as to ease the pressure of maturity redemption, and does not hesitate to dilute more equity for this purpose.

In the early stage, many investors on Xueqiu made sharp remarks: the JinkoSolar system is in a state of high debt, high capital expenditure and low own cash flow, and the new business is more like a "story asset" created for financing; the model of "renewing loans by themes, sustaining life by financing, and maintaining collateral by stock price" will eventually end up with the story unable to continue, the capital chain completely broken, the project unfinished, and the valuation returning to zero...

Up to now, JinkoSolar has recorded losses for 7 consecutive quarters.

This year, Li Xiande started to make adjustments. Different from the "professional manager" model he often talks about, JinkoSolar's core management has long had a strong family co-governance attribute, but this structure has changed this year.

In March, Chen Kangping resigned as general manager of JinkoSolar's A-share listed company and transferred to the post of vice chairman. At that time, the industry speculated that JinkoSolar was gradually downplaying the color of a family business. Four months later, Chen Kangping resigned all his positions including vice chairman, director and member of the Strategy and Sustainability Committee, completely withdrawing from the listed company and all its subsidiaries.

The new successor is Cao Haiyun, the former person in charge of finance. Similar to Du Wei's background, he also has strong financial attributes — a financial veteran with Chinese Certified Public Accountant and American Certified Public Accountant qualifications, and experience from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Chen Kangping has a deep foundation in the JinkoSolar system. Since joining the company in 2007, he has been present at every stage of the company's financing, listing, and capital operation. He is also the brother-in-law of Li Xiande, forming the "Iron Triangle" of JinkoSolar with Li Xiande and Li Xianhua. The three indirectly control more than 50% of the company's shares — which is also regarded as the underlying bond that there has never been internal strife in the