Panasonic was a major supplier of PV modules into the US last decade, but it pulled out of the market almost entirely in 2011 to take advantage of the Japanese solar boom sparked by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. 

Even after 2012, when Panasonic bolstered its 600MW of module production capacity in Japan with 320MW of additional capacity in Malaysia, the company was still “selling more into Japan than we could actually produce”, says Mukesh Sethi, manager of the solar group at Panasonic Eco Solutions North America.

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