First Solar Follows Tesla, Big Stock Offering After Huge Stock Price Gains

Energy

Published: June 11, 2013 5:06 pm

Last Updated: June 12, 2013 6:34 am

Is First Solar Inc. (NASDAQ: FSLR) stealing a page from the playbook of Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA). A fresh automatic shelf registration statement was issued by the top solar player in the United States. Normally these filings do not assure that a securities sale is coming. That is not the case here as First Solar immediately issued a press release signaling that it is offering 8,500,000 shares of its common stock in a capital raise.

First Solar’s “use of proceeds” said that the company intends to capital for general corporate purposes. This was specified as being for acquisitions of under development photovoltaic solar power system projects, investments in photovoltaic solar power system projects that will be jointly developed with strategic partners and capital expenditures or strategic investments to develop certain business units and expand in new geographies.

What was not specified was any long-term government loan repayments, but we suspect that First Solar has made this filing to allow for the possible repayment of at least part of a Department of Energy loan just like you saw with Tesla. After all, the stock had rallied exponentially and the secondary offering was at least temporarily well received after the loan repayments.

J.P. Morgan Securities, Morgan Stanley, BofA/Merrill Lynch and Citigroup are the joint book-running managers. The book-running managers are listed as Credit Suisse, HSBC, Credit Agricole CIB and Goldman Sachs. First Solar has granted these underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,275,000 shares of common stock.

Shares of First Solar closed down over 7% at $52.29 on Tuesday against a 52-week trading range of $12.50 to $59.00. While shares were up almost 70% so far in 2013 even after the 7% price drop, the initial after-hours reaction had shares down another 4%.

First Solar had a closing bell market cap of about $4.6 billion. Its March 30 cash balance and short-term investments was more than $1 billion, but First Solar carried $501 million in long-term debt and $560 million in “other” liabilities.

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