ABOUT

Organization Background

          SunEdison is a global solar energy company headquartered in the U.S. In addition to developing, building, owning, and operatingsolar power plants, it also manufactures high purity silicon, monocrystalline silicon ingots, silicon wafers, solar modules, solar energy systems, and solar module racking systems. Originally a silicon-wafer manufacturer established in 1959 as the Monsanto Electronic Materials Company, a former business unit of Monsanto Company, SunEdison is based in St. Peters, Missouri, and the company's solar-energy headquarters is located in Belmont, California with offices throughout the world. Monsanto sold the company in 1989. Prior to May 30, 2013, the company was known as MEMC Electronic Materials; the name change to SunEdison reflects the company's focus on solar energy.^[2] The company also continues to manufacture silicon wafers for thesemiconductor industry through its subsidiary SunEdison Semiconductor.

           Established in the early stages of the semiconductor electronics industry in 1959, MEMC was for the next half century a major and pioneering manufacturer of silicon wafers, the most basic element of semiconductor-chip manufacturing. The company entered the solar market in a big way beginning in 2006, with longterm contracts to manufacture and sell solar wafers to several large Asian solar-energy companies. Contracts with other solar-energy companies followed, as did joint-venture projects on solar power plants. With the acquisition of the large, successful, and pioneering solar-energy systems company SunEdison LLC in late 2009 and the smaller solar-power companies Axio and Fotowatio in 2011, MEMC focused increasingly on the burgeoning solar-energy industry to offset the cyclical downturns in the semiconductor market. The company now develops, finances, and maintains solar power systems and plants for a widespread commercial, public-sector, and power-plant customer base, and its name change in 2013 to SunEdison, Inc. reflects its main focus. It is one of the leading solar-power companies worldwide, and with its acquisition of wind-energy company First Wind in 2014, SunEdison is the leading renewable energy development company in the world

Business segments

Since the acquisition of SunEdison MEMC has had three reporting segments.

• Semiconductor Wafers delivers wafers to the electronics industry. Products of MEMC include 300 mm wafers, production capacities allow for 2 million wafers per month. Apart from plants in Asia (Utsunomiya, Japan; Chonan, South Korea; Taisil, Taiwan; Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh, Malaysia) MEMC operates a production facility in Novara, Italy. Production plants in the United States (St. Peters, Missouri and Sherman, Texas) are scheduled to be closed and capacities to be moved to Asia. MEMC produces polished and epitaxial wafers, High Resistivity Wafers and SOI Wafers. Main competition in this segment comes from SUMCO, ShinEtsu, Siltronic and Siltron. The market share of MEMC is roughly 12 per cent.
  

• Solar Materials: MEMC produces Polysilicon in purities usable in the solar and semiconductor industry in Pasadena, Texas and Merano, Italy. Production capacities equal 10,000 tons per annum, an expansion to 12,500 by the end of 2011 was announced. The material is mainly used for their own following production steps, sales to the spot market occurred between 2006 and 2009. Apart from opportunistic sales of silanes the segment sells mainly solar wafers. As their own productions capacities of 600 MW were not sufficient, MEMC also had tolling partners to produce these wafers. The Solar Materials division also has a plant in Portland, Oregon that was acquired from Solaicx in 2010 and produces ingots using the continuous crystal pulling technology, enabling the production of cheap mono-crystalline solar wafers.

• SunEdison offers customers access to solar power without financing the individual projects generating the power. SunEdison collects capital from investors and uses it to construct photovoltaic plants (installing MEMC Solar Wafers in some cases). The plants are operated by SunEdison after construction. Investors receive a cash flow from sold solar power, including subsidies from governmental organizations. The solar power is sold to commercial, government, and utility customers.