JA Solar (JASO) is down about 15% ahead of the bell today after reporting a much steeper loss than what analysts had expected.  The company reported a quarterly loss of .18/share vs expectations of a .05 loss.  Revenues were awful at $34 million which badly missed estimates of $112 million and represented a nearly 80% plunge from the year ago quarter. 

“The first quarter of 2009 was the most challenging quarter for JA Solar since the company was founded in 2005,” said Samuel Yang, CEO of JA Solar. “The global industry conditions were particularly difficult, with the market affected by worse than normal seasonality, a weak macro-economic environment and the continuing impact of the credit crisis resulting in some issues with customer project financing. However, we are actively managing our business to prepare for what we hope to be the market’s recovery in the latter part of this year and we are seeing encouraging signs of market improvement in key end markets. We have sufficient liquidity to sustain the current downturn and we are positioning ourselves for growth in the second half of 2009 and beyond,” he said.

The company believes it is unlikely to achieve the results as given in the 2009 guidance provided on March 10, 2009, which was for revenue of $830 million to $952 million and production output of 500 MW to 550 MW.

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