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

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

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

JA Solar (JASO) Hammered After Reporting Steep Loss