Spire Corp has just announced in quick succession two siginificant pieces of news;

i) A new product - a 100 MW turnkey solar module production line

ii) A contract for it's Bandwidth semiconductor subsidiary with Principia, worth over $16 m in revenues over 3 years

Some people might take the view that the solar boom is a new gold rush, so the best place to be invested is in the guys selling and making the shovels and shallow pans because the returns were - on average - higher and the risks much lower. It may be a crude analogy, but it's always worth looking at things in new ways. So translating this idea to Spire is worth some analysis. Spire does the "shovel production and distirbution" - selling solar manufacturing equipment, turnkey module manufacturing lines and turnkey cell and wafer production lines. It also does the relatively vanilla solar work - "gold-prospecting" - designing, manufacturing and integrating photovoltaic systems and modules.

Anyway the long and short of this is this;

if I was taking a bet on the best future returns in the solar industry, I'd rather be part of the former than the latter.