Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.
What: Shares of Yingli Green Energy Hold. Co. Ltd. (NYSE: YGE) fell more than 10% early Tuesday, then recovered slightly to close down around 8.5% after the Chinese solar specialist's fourth-quarter results missed Wall Street's expectations.
So what: Quarterly revenue rose 31% to $613 million, helped by photovoltaic module shipment growth of 11.4% year over year. That translated to an adjusted net loss of $0.31 per American depositary share. Analysts, on average, were looking for a narrower $0.17 per share loss on revenue of $651.55 million.
Yingli also says it's targeting full-year 2014 PV module shipments in the range of 4.0 GW to 4.2 GW, or an impressive increase of 29.4% to 32.6% over fiscal 2013.
Now what: Even putting aside its fourth-quarter miss, however, Yingli isn't expected to turn a profit this year. It also still needs to dig itself out of its massive $2.5 billion pile of debt. Until Yingli can clean up its balance sheet and prove to investors it has what it takes to eventually churn out a sustainable profit, I think investors would be wise to avoid using the drop as a buying opportunity.
