Whois & Analysis for firstsolar.com

In microeconomics and management, vertical integration is an arrangement in which the supply chain of a company is owned by that company.

Usually each member of the supply chain produces a different product or (market-specific) service, and the products combine to satisfy a common need.

It is contrasted with horizontal integration, wherein a company produces several items which are related to one another.

Vertical integration has also described management styles that bring large portions of the supply chain not only under a common ownership, but also into one corporation (as in the 1920s when the Ford River Rouge Complex began making much of its own steel rather than buying it from suppliers).

In economics, utility is a measure of preferences over some set of goods (including services: something that satisfies human wants); it represents satisfaction experienced by the consumer of a good.

The concept is an important underpinning of rational choice theory in economics and game theory: since one cannot directly measure benefit, satisfaction or happiness from a good or service, economists instead have devised ways of representing and measuring utility in terms of measurable economic choices.

Economists have attempted to perfect highly abstract methods of comparing utilities by observing and calculating economic choices; in the simplest sense, economists consider utility to be revealed in people's willingness to pay different amounts for different goods.

In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to size, output, or scale of operation, with cost per unit of output generally decreasing with increasing scale as fixed costs are spread out over more units of output.

To invest is to allocate money (or sometimes another resource, such as time) in the expectation of some benefit in the future.

First Solar, Inc. is an American photovoltaic (PV) manufacturer of rigid thin film modules, or solar panels, and a provider of utility-scale PV power plants and supporting services that include finance, construction, maintenance and end-of-life panel recycling.

First Solar uses cadmium telluride (CdTe) as a semiconductor to produce CdTe-panels, that are competing successfully with conventional crystalline silicon technology.

In 2009, First Solar became the first solar panel manufacturing company to lower its manufacturing cost to $1 per watt and produced CdTe-panels with an efficiency of about 14 percent at a reported cost of 59 cents per watt in 2013.