This guest post is by: Dave Jones , global insights programme director at Ember Libby Copsey , data developer at Ember Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were among the top importers of Chinese solar panels in 2024, with more than half heading to countries in the global south. The findings come from Ember’s China’s solar PV export explorer, which tracks shipments to more than 200 countries and was recently updated with figures for the full year of 2024. In total, China’s solar panel exports rose by 10% in 2024, with imports by global-south countries rising by 32% and those to the global north falling by 6%. This means Chinese exports grew less quickly than the 30% rise in solar installations outside China last year, indicating that other countries have been boosting their own solar manufacturing capacity and that already-imported stocks were being run down. Apart from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which both witnessed different solar booms last year, there was also a sharp uptick in sales to many small African and Latin American countries in late 2024, suggesting that China may be finding new markets for its solar exports. China itself – the biggest of all the global-south solar markets – installed more solar panels than it exported for the second year in a row. This article analyses the latest trends from China’s solar export data, highlighting the markets currently seeing record growth and the trends that underlie this. Global-south sales surge China’s exports of solar panels to the global south have doubled in the past two years, overtaking global-north sales for the first time since 2018, according to data collated in the Ember export explorer. Global-south imports more than doubled from 60 gigawatts (GW) in 2022 to 126GW in 2024. That surpassed global-north imports, which were only 12% more […]