(Yicai) April 25 -- Shares of Jolywood slumped after the major global supplier of backsheets for solar panels unexpectedly announced its first quarterly loss in the past three years amid falling sales.

The developer photovoltaic power plants and module materials [SHE: 300393] closed 7.1 percent lower at CNY7.49 (USD1) after tumbling by as much as 11.5 percent at the open.

In the first quarter, Jolywood earned CNY1.3 billion (USD179 million) in operating income, down 52 percent from a year earlier, due to poor sales, the Suzhou-based company announced in its financial report released after-hours yesterday. Net loss tallied CNY172 million (USD23.7 million) in comparison to a profit of CNY103 million in the same period of last year. The firm did not disclose why the sudden change.

The downturn marks a sharp contrast to the firm's stellar sales for last year. Jolywood announced yesterday that its 2023 revenue jumped by 28 percent year-over-year to CNY12.3 billion (USD1.7 billion), breaking through CNY10 billion for the first time in history. Net profit soared by 31 percent to CNY527 million.

In a separate announcement, the firm terminated its CNY14 billion investment plan first announced in March 2022 when high-purity polysilicon was in short supply and extremely pricey. Now the attempt to foray into the upstream business was revoked due to a big price slump. The cancelation will not affect the company’s current financial situation as the project was not far along yet, it said.

Initially, Jolywood's main business was the production of solar backsheets and it sold a record high of about 256 million square meters of such structural components last year, according to the annual report. 

But other segments are becoming more profitable. Developing and contracting PV power plants made up 37 percent of the company's operating income last year, while its PV panel business accounted for 36 percent, and the backsheets business generated just 19 percent, per the annual report.

Meanwhile, revenue coming from abroad made up 36 percent of the firm's total last year.

Editor: Emmi Laine