LONGI Silicon Materials is engaged in the research, manufacture and distribution of monocrystalline ingots. It is the world's largest
monocrystalline silicon manufacturer, and has rapidly broken world solar efficiency records three times within five months.
Fast Company listed Xi'an LONGi Silicon Materials one among "Most Innovative Companies 2013" "for supplying the solar industry with high-quality silicon wafers at low cost".
Business LONGi has been called the fastest growing PV manufacturer in the industry. LONGi annual revenue in 2013 was derived entirely from selling around US$330 million of mono c-Si wafers, but by 2016 that annual revenue had skyrocketed to approximately US$1.67 billion. That was a nearly 94% increase over the 2015
fiscal year, which had itself generated a revenue growth of around 61% over the year before. LONGi has manufacturing plants in
Mainland China, India and
Malaysia, and has acquired production facilities from other companies, including from American manufacturer
SunEdison. However,
Photon.Info reports that Longi Green Energy is mulling an open manufactory in the USA. Longi Silicon is a member of the
Silicon Module Super League (SMSL), which had been a group of big-six c-Si module suppliers in the solar PV industry today until Longi was admitted. The other six members of the SMSL group are
Canadian Solar,
Hanwha Q CELLS,
JA Solar,
Jinko Solar,
Trina Solar, and
GCL. Longi Silicon has been listed on the
Shanghai Stock Exchange (security code: 601012) since April 2012.
Research and development LONGi Solar, a subsidiary of LONGI Green Energy Technology, achieved in 2018 a new industry record with 23.6%
conversion efficiency with its P-type monocrystalline PERC (
passivated emitter rear cell) solar cells, toward which an increasing number of manufacturers worldwide are migrating. The technique involves taking a silicon wafer, typically 1 to 2 mm thick, and making a multitude of parallel, transverse slices across the wafer, creating a large number of slivers that have a thickness of 50 micrometres and a width equal to the thickness of the original wafer. These slices are rotated 90 degrees, so that the surfaces corresponding to the faces of the original wafer become the edges of the slivers. The result is to convert, for example, a 150 mm diameter, 2 mm-thick wafer having an exposed silicon surface area of about 175 cm2 per side into about 1000 slivers having dimensions of 100 mm × 2 mm × 0.1 mm, yielding a total exposed silicon surface area of about 2000 cm2 per side. The electrical doping and contacts that had been on the face of the wafer are now located at the edges of the sliver, rather than at the front and rear as in the case of conventional wafer cells, as a result of this rotation. This results in making the cell sensitive on both sides, from both the front and rear of the cell (a property known as
bifaciality). , LONGi appears 9 times on the data table for the
National Laboratory of the Rockies Best Research-Cell Efficiency Chart (cell-efficiency-data-table.xlsx), specifically in the silicon heterostructure and perovskite/Si categories. == Products ==