On 10 June 2015, the chairmen of the boards of CNBM and CTIEC, Song Zhiping and Peng Shou, were received by Saxon Minister-President Stanislaw Tillich on the rooftop terrace of the state’s parliament building. They were joined in this hour-long conversation by further members of the companies’ management boards and by managers from CNBM’s German subsidiaries, Avancis and CTF Solar.

This was not the first time that the CNBM Group had met representatives of the Saxon government: in April 2014, Peng Shou, chairman of the board at the CNBM subsidiary CTIEC, met the then Saxon Minister of Economic Affairs, Sven Morlok (see our news item dated 30 April 2014) in Dresden, and in May 2015 CNBM welcomed to Beijing a delegation led by Sven Morlok’s successor, Martin Dulig. However, the recent meeting with the Minister-President took CNBM’s dialogue with the Saxon government to the highest possible level.

Discussions centred on the CNBM Group’s economic activities in Saxony, both past and future. In Saxony the Group has a stake in both CIGS technology (in Torgau, where its subsidiary Avancis produces thin-film solar panels) and CdTe (in the form of CTF Solar’s R&D centre in Dresden), and hence in the two most advanced and future-proof thin-film technologies available for the production of solar panels.

Song Zhiping explained at the meeting that, by acquiring CTF Solar from Roth & Rau AG in 2012, CTIEC had prevented the closure of CTF Solar, and so kept CdTe technology in Saxony. Since then CTIEC has invested heavily in the development of CTF Solar’s R&D centre in Dresden, and in collaboration with various research institutes in Saxony, notably the Fraunhofer Institute for Electron Beam and Plasma Research (FEP).