亚洲光伏制造业的十字路口

June 25, 2026Hannah Pitt (hpitt@rhg.com), Shweta Movalia (smovalia@rhg.com), Khushi Jain (kjain@rhg.com) For governments and firms looking to diversify clean technology supply chains,solar stands out as a unique challenge given China’s scale and cost advantages.The US has ramped up trade barriers to reduce reliance on China’s domestic andoverseas solar manufacturing, imposing anti-dumping and countervailing dutiesof up to 3400% on Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia in April 2025,countries that have received significant Chinese solar manufacturing investment.Over the past year, these duties have all but eliminated Chinese investment andreduced manufacturing capacity in these countries by nearly 40%. But US trade measures have largely led to a reshuffling of Chinese investment tonew geographies,and the growing breadth of enforcement risksdeterring non-Chinese investment that could serve as a genuine alternative. India is one suchpromisingalternative,on track to become the world’s third-largest solarmanufacturing base after nearly a decade of domestic-led investment. But India’ssolar industry is heavily reliant on China for upstream inputs, which exposesIndian producers to the same kind of US trade scrutiny as Southeast Asia. The USDepartment of Commerce introduced steep tariffs on solar imports from India inFebruary2026,exacerbating domestic overcapacity concerns and leadinginvestment in India to fall 27% quarter-on-quarter. In this note, we use Rhodium’sClean Investment Monitordata to dig into what’s been happening in Southeast Asiaand India—regions that have absorbed the most solar manufacturing investmentglobally outside of the US, Europe, and China since 2018—and explore what thesetrends mean for broader diversification efforts. Diversification is hard to do Over the last decade, China has emerged as the dominant global player in many cleanmanufacturingsupply chains,including solar,electric vehicles(EVs),and batteries. Governments worldwide are now looking to mitigate their exposure to this concentration,using trade barriers to protect domestic industries and forging new trade partnerships asalternatives. But disentangling from China has proven challenging, given China’s steepcost advantages and excess capacity that spans the entire supply chain. Nowhere is this more evident than solar. China has seen more than 80% of globalinvestment in solar supply chain components since 2018 (Figure 1). After years of heavyinvestment, China is now home to 90% of global solar cell manufacturing—whichrepresents more than twice global demand in 2025—and more than 99% of the upstreaminputs, including wafers and polysilicon.New investment is slowing under pressure fromovercapacity and domestic price wars, but China’s manufacturing base will endure. The scale of China’s production has driven costs down, enabling massive global solardeployment, but excess supply and low prices make it hard for other countries to competeon manufacturing. For more than a decade, the US has erected trade barriers againstChinese solar manufacturers in successive waves to protect domestic manufacturers.Early efforts triggered China to begin relocating production in Southeast Asian countries.This prompted US trade officials to impose sweeping duties to tackle circumvention, withsteep tariffs imposed on solar cells and modules imported from Vietnam, Thailand,Cambodia, and Malaysia in the spring of 2025. US trade enforcement has slowed Chinese solar investment in the region as intended butis not without tradeoffs. Chinese investment has simply shifted elsewhere, while genuinelydomestic and non-Chinese producers in the target countries have suffered as collateralunder blanket tariffs. The latest fallout from US trade investigations is now hitting closerto home: in late June 2026, a group of US solar manufacturers filed an anti-circumventioninquiry against Qcells, a South Korean company with operations in the US and a drivingforce behind securing duties against Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia. Thecase, which focuses on the use of Chinese wafers in Qcells South Korean production,illustrates a fracturing of the US domestic solar industry, withcompanies who lost access to low-cost Southeast Asian cell supplies due to the AD/CVD tariffs now fighting backagainst the company that led the charge, and the focus on Chinese upstream dependencycould pose risks for any manufacturer looking to serve the US market. Meanwhile, countries with large solar manufacturing industries well-positioned to act asalternatives—India chief among them—have built their solar industries largely reliant onChina for upstream inputs such as polysilicon, ingots, and wafers. Access to cheap inputsis part of what has enabled rapid scale-up—with India’s annual investment in the solarsupply chain growing by a factor of ten in the last five years—but it’s also a majorvulnerability. Reliance on Chinese inputs may undermine the case for India and other hubsto serve a