The love-hate history of capital tycoon IDG in the photovoltaic sector: making a staggering 14 billion yuan in profits on one hand, yet getting trapped on the other

Recently, Aikosolar Co., Ltd. (SH: 600732) released its third-quarter performance report, announcing that the company has successfully achieved profitability in a single quarter.

China Energy Network noticed that behind Aikosolar's single-quarter profitability, an investment institution is stepping up its exit. Over the past year, international private equity platform IDG has cashed out approximately 1.042 billion yuan to 1.234 billion yuan from Aikosolar.

In fact, IDG's cashing out from Aikosolar started as early as 2022. Over the past four years, IDG has cumulatively cashed out more than 14 billion yuan from Aikosolar.

It is worth noting that Aikosolar is only one of the enterprises in IDG's photovoltaic industry layout. During the boom period of the photovoltaic industry in previous years, IDG invested heavily in emerging photovoltaic enterprises and participated in building a number of unicorn enterprises, including wafer manufacturer Gokin Solar, inverter manufacturer Growatt, polysilicon producer Qinghai Lihao, leading residential photovoltaic enterprise Chint Aneng, and leading perovskite technology enterprise GCL Optoelectronics.

However, unlike the lucky investment in Aikosolar, after the photovoltaic industry entered a downward cycle after 2023 and the A-share market tightened IPO review, most photovoltaic enterprises invested by IDG failed to successfully complete their IPOs. IDG could not realize its exit and was completely "trapped".

Now, Aikosolar's single-quarter profitability indicates that the cyclical inflection point of the photovoltaic industry is just around the corner. For IDG, instead of rushing to exit now, it is better to be more patient and wait for the arrival of the photovoltaic spring.

Invested only 1 billion yuan, cashed out over 14 billion yuan

IDG's investment in Aikosolar can be traced back to 2009, when IDG led the angel round investment of Aikosolar and became the earliest institutional investor in the development process of Aikosolar.

In 2016, the technical route of the photovoltaic industry began to shift to PERC. Aikosolar invented the tubular PERC technology and rose rapidly. IDG also began to heavily allocate positions in Aikosolar at this time. To this end, IDG specially established a private equity fund called Yiwu Qiguang Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership) (hereinafter referred to as "Yiwu Qiguang"). It is worth noting that local state-owned assets from Yiwu, Zhuhai, Tianjin, Chongqing and other regions also participated in this fund. The total size of the fund is 954 million yuan, of which the investment amount in Aikosolar is 953 million yuan.

The 953 million yuan investment in Aikosolar was completed mainly through three transactions, including transferring old shares and capital increase. Specifically, in December 2016, IDG acquired 20% equity of Guangdong Aikosolar (the predecessor of Aikosolar) held by Jiangsu Akcome for 210 million yuan; in January 2017, it acquired 10% equity held by SME Fund for 200 million yuan; then it increased capital by 543 million yuan to subscribe for the new registered capital. Through these three rounds of transactions, IDG obtained 60.7579 million yuan of registered capital of Guangdong Aikosolar with 953 million yuan.

In October 2017, Guangdong Aikosolar was officially restructured into Aikosolar Technology. IDG held 60.7579 million shares of it, accounting for as high as 43.75%, second only to Chen Gang, the founder of the company, and became the second largest shareholder of the company.

In 2019, Aikosolar landed on the A-share market through backdoor listing of "ST Xinmei", with a transaction value of 5.885 billion yuan at that time. After the transaction was completed, Yiwu Qiguang held a total of 569 million shares of Aikosolar, and the shareholding ratio was adjusted to 31.08% due to the expansion of share capital, but it still firmly occupied the position of the second largest shareholder.

In December 2019, after ST Xinmei was officially renamed ST Aikosolar, its share price began to rise all the way, and IDG's initial cost of 953 million yuan also continued to appreciate. By the end of the second quarter of 2022, the market value of its positions had reached 18.78 billion yuan.

Since the shares of shareholders from backdoor listing have a lock-up period of 36 months, Yiwu Qiguang did not start to reduce its holdings of shares to cash out until the third quarter of 2022. By the end of the third quarter of 2022, IDG's shareholding number had been greatly reduced to 195 million shares, and the shareholding ratio dropped to 17.15%. This means that IDG reduced its holdings of 374 million shares of Aikosolar in one quarter, when Aikosolar's share price was at a historical high. Calculated based on the share price range of 33.02 yuan/share to 37.41 yuan/share from June 30, 2022 to September 30, 2022, IDG cashed out about 12.3 billion yuan to 13.9 billion yuan at one time. Of course, since this huge reduction is likely to include agreement transfer and block trading discount, the actual cash-out amount may be lower than the upper limit of this theoretical range.

In the fourth quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, IDG reduced its holdings of 21 million shares and 12 million shares of Aikosolar respectively. The total cash-out amount of these two reductions was roughly between 930 million yuan and 1.55 billion yuan, and IDG officially changed from the second largest shareholder of Aikosolar to the third largest shareholder.

In the third quarter of 2025, IDG launched a new round of share reduction actions for Aikosolar. By the end of the third quarter of 2026, it had cumulatively reduced its holdings of 83.83 million shares, cashing out about 1.042 billion yuan to 1.234 billion yuan.

Calculated in this way, up to now, IDG has cashed out at least 14.2 billion yuan from Aikosolar before and after. According to the current share price, the market value of the remaining 84.72 million shares also exceeds 1 billion yuan, which can be described as extremely profitable.

Spread investments across the photovoltaic industry, but got "trapped"

IDG's investments in other photovoltaic enterprises are not so lucky.

IDG Capital laid out the photovoltaic sector relatively early. When participating in Aikosolar's angel round investment, the company also made "wide-spread" investments in GS-Solar, Kilowatt New Energy and Tianhua Solar.

However, at present, except that GS-Solar is in a leading position in the field of high-efficiency heterojunction cell technology, the main business of Kilowatt New Energy has changed from photovoltaic grid-tied inverters to energy storage, and its scale has always been small. Although Tianhua Solar was once listed on NASDAQ in the United States, its share price continued to be sluggish, and its performance was also very poor. It was delisted in October 2020, and the company has now entered bankruptcy liquidation.

In 2019, IDG launched a new round of photovoltaic investment.

In July 2019, IDG jointly established Gokin Solar with Zhuhai Huafa Group, and began to incubate this emerging wafer enterprise from scratch. In the first round of financing in March 2021, IDG subscribed for new registered capital with 800 million yuan, holding nearly 40% equity of Gokin Solar in total; in April and August 2022, IDG continued to follow up the company's Series A and Series B financing, and the total financing amount of Gokin in the two rounds reached 4.115 billion yuan.

It is worth mentioning that as a company also invested by IDG, Aikosolar has provided a lot of orders for Gokin Solar. The prospectus previously submitted by Gokin Solar shows that from 2021 to 2022, the company's sales revenue from Aikosolar reached 1.218 billion yuan and 3.774 billion yuan respectively, and the revenue proportion once reached as high as 48.9%.

With the financial support of IDG, Gokin Solar rose rapidly, and its wafer production capacity soon ranked among the top three in the world, with a peak valuation of 20 billion yuan.

However, Gokin Solar's capitalization path has been full of twists and turns. The company launched the IPO process as early as November 2022, and first applied for the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) in June 2023, but voluntarily withdrew the application only more than 3 months later. It quickly restarted the tutoring in November 2023, and has now advanced to the 11th phase, but has not yet submitted a formal listing application.

Although IDG did not directly participate in the establishment of Qinghai Lihao, in December 2021, IDG quickly appeared in the Series A financing of Qinghai Lihao. In September 2022, Qinghai Lihao announced the completion of 2.2 billion yuan Series B financing, and IDG followed up the investment again.

Aikosolar also contributed 385 million yuan in 2022 to obtain 2.78% equity of Qinghai Lihao. Chen Gang, Chairman of Aikosolar, still holds 4.83% shares of Qinghai Lihao to this day.

With the support of capital such as IDG, Qinghai Lihao expanded rapidly in Xining of Qinghai, Yibin of Sichuan and Baotou of Inner Mongolia. By the end of 2025, the completed and put into production high-purity crystalline silicon production capacity exceeded 200,000 tons, and there was another 100,000 tons of production capacity under construction, ranking the sixth among domestic peers. Its valuation once approached 14 billion yuan.

But similar to Gokin, Qinghai Lihao's listing path has also been basically blocked. In February 2026, Tongwei Co., Ltd. (SH: 600438) announced that it planned to acquire 100% equity of Qinghai Lihao. On September 24, the State Administration for Market Regulation also unconditionally approved the matter, but the valuation and payment plan are still under negotiation. Tongwei's move is a good thing for shareholders such as IDG, creating an exit opportunity for them.

Compared with Gokin Solar and Qinghai Lihao, the situation of Growatt, another photovoltaic inverter enterprise invested by IDG, is better.

In June 2022, on the eve of Growatt's first submission of IPO application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, IDG, through its two platforms Best Select and Bateson Group, participated in Growatt's financing with 900 million yuan and obtained 6.52% shares. At the end of 2025, it increased its investment by another 216 million yuan, and its shareholding ratio rose to 10.42%, becoming the largest institutional shareholder of Growatt.

However, since IDG's investment, Growatt has submitted listing applications to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for three consecutive times, the most recent one was in June 2026, and it is still in the review stage.

Not only in the upstream of the industrial chain, IDG also has investments in the downstream. In August 2021, IDG participated in the 1 billion yuan Series A financing of Chint Aneng, the leading residential photovoltaic enterprise, through its Tianjin Hexie Haihe Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership), and increased its investment again during the 4 billion yuan Series B financing in 2022. At present, the shareholding ratio is 2.53%, ranking the fourth largest shareholder of Chint Aneng.

It is worth noting that Chint Aneng also submitted a listing application to the A-share market in June 2023, but voluntarily withdrew the application in September 2025, and instead its parent company Chint Electric carried out IPO on the H-share market alone.

China Energy Network noticed that in the Chint system, IDG also invested in Chint Power and obtained rich returns. In November 2022, two funds under IDG, Zhuhai Yuening and Zhuhai Kangdong, contributed a total of 391 million yuan to acquire part of the equity of Tongrun Equipment at a price of 9.54 yuan per share. After the transaction was completed, IDG held a total of 11.5% of the total share capital of Tongrun Equipment. Later, Chint Electric injected its photovoltaic inverter and energy storage business into Tongrun Equipment and renamed it Chint Power, and the company's share price rose.

Basically consistent with the pace of Aikosolar's share reduction, starting from August 2025, Zhuhai Yuening and Zhuhai Kangdong reduced their holdings of Chint Power shares. By the end of the third quarter of 2026, the two parties had cumulatively cashed out about 437 million yuan through multiple reductions, having long recovered the principal of their investment. After multiple reductions, the total shareholding ratio of Zhuhai Yuening and Zhuhai Kangdong has dropped from the initial 11.5% to about 3.99%.

From Gokin and Lihao to Growatt and Chint Aneng, the one who most wants to withdraw now must be IDG. But in the repeated cycles of the photovoltaic industry, capital should grow together with the industry, and enterprises need the support of patient capital more. If everyone chooses to cash out and exit under the nature of profit-seeking, it will undoubtedly make the already "involution" industry worse. IDG, it is better to be more patient.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "China Energy Network", author: Gao Ming, editor: Han Chenggong, published by 36Kr with authorization.