Four months into his tenure as chief executive, Mark Widmar was explaining why First Solar would abandon its next product. Series 5 had a name, a place on the roadmap, and plans attached to it. In November 2016, the company cancelled it. The future would arrive wearing a different number.
First Solar would move faster toward Series 6, converting existing factories rather than taking the intermediate step it had planned. It was a consequential introduction to the CEO’s job for an executive who had spent much of his career in finance. Sunlight was free. Replacing the machinery that turned it into a business was another matter.
The transition came with restructuring, asset write-downs, and workforce reductions. The company announced plans to cut about 1,600 jobs worldwide. That belongs in the story alongside everything built afterward. A technology roadmap can look wonderfully clean once the people affected by its revisions have been removed from the diagram.
An accountant’s industrial education
Widmar’s route to that decision began well away from solar cells. He earned a business accounting degree and an MBA at Indiana University, then started as an accountant at Ernst & Young in 1987. His subsequent career passed through businesses concerned with electronics, industrial materials, and the practical business of making things.
At Dell, he served as a division controller from 2000 to 2002. He moved to NCR as a business unit CFO, later becoming corporate controller. In 2006 he became CFO of GrafTech International, whose advanced carbon and graphite materials supplied another corner of the industrial economy. He joined First Solar in April 2011.
That sequence helps explain the professional vocabulary he brought with him. Costs, capacity, and cash were familiar subjects before he had responsibility for a solar manufacturer’s direction. His experience also included being president of GrafTech’s engineering solutions business. The distance between the accounts and the operation had already narrowed.
Accountant
Chief financial officer
Chief executive
At First Solar, the CFO brief covered financial planning, treasury, internal audit, investor relations, accounting, and tax. He also served for a period as chief accounting officer. By the time he succeeded James Hughes as CEO in July 2016, he had spent five years inside the company’s financial machinery.
The missing number in the product line
The Series 6 decision provides a useful view of how Widmar worked through a problem in public. On the third-quarter 2016 earnings call, he described two internal tiger teams. One examined how much cost could be taken out of Series 5. The other considered how quickly Series 6 could be brought forward.
The exercise had a commercial purpose. Module prices were falling sharply, changing the economics of a plan that had expected the two products to coexist. A product can be perfectly respectable and still arrive at an inconvenient price. Engineering has to answer to physics; manufacturing also receives regular correspondence from the market.
“Recent steep module pricing declines require us to evaluate all components of our cost structure…”
Mark Widmar · November 2016
The company’s answer was to cancel Series 5 and accelerate Series 6 production into 2018. It anticipated hundreds of millions of dollars in restructuring and impairment charges. The move demanded more than an announcement: factories had to be converted while an existing product was wound down.
By October 2018, Series 6 production had started at three factory locations, including Vietnam. That was a tangible checkpoint. The decision had become equipment, output, and shipments. It also illustrates why a manufacturing strategy takes longer to judge than a speech. There is a considerable interval between choosing a production process and getting it to repeat itself reliably.
A promise with a delivery date
Widmar’s subject is often described simply as solar. His business is more particular. First Solar makes thin-film photovoltaic modules using cadmium telluride, usually abbreviated CdTe. That sets its manufacturing process apart from the crystalline-silicon route used by much of the industry. The distinction affects what factories need and where their supply chains lead.
The company describes a continuous, vertically integrated process that produces modules under one roof. For Widmar, that offers a basis for discussing traceability and supply security alongside performance. A panel’s ability to generate electricity matters. So does the manufacturer’s ability to deliver the specified panel when a project needs it.
His December 2017 description of demand made that tension unusually concrete. Some customers were buying modules before they had secured firm buyers for the electricity their projects would generate. The usual order of procurement had been reversed. First Solar had to allocate supply among customers, markets, and its own development opportunities.
That is an awkward kind of success: demand arrives early and brings a scheduling problem. Widmar’s account stayed close to those practical details. Which commitments were final? Which still needed regulatory approval? How much volume should be reserved? The conversation was about the mechanics of getting a solar project built.
Years later, his shareholder letter returned to contract certainty and supply reliability. There is continuity in that emphasis. A module manufacturer sells into someone else’s long sequence of financing and construction decisions. Its reliability becomes part of the customer’s calculation, long before the first watt reaches the grid.
For a former CFO, the appeal of that promise is easy to understand. A customer can compare a module’s specifications before placing an order, but the delivery commitment reaches into the schedule of an entire power plant. The business therefore asks Widmar to think beyond the factory gate. His own account of procurement in 2017 showed how quickly a manufacturer’s decisions could become another company’s constraint. Supply was a relationship to manage, with commitments on both sides and little room for casual promises.
The laboratory keeps its own calendar
The finance background can obscure another part of Widmar’s tenure: the willingness to spend on research whose commercial result remains ahead. In May 2023, First Solar acquired Evolar, a Swedish specialist in perovskite technology. It paid approximately $38 million at closing, with up to $42 million more tied to technical milestones.
The structure put a price on both existing expertise and work still to be proved. Evolar’s Uppsala laboratory extended First Solar’s research network into Europe. Its researchers would work with colleagues in California and Ohio on next-generation photovoltaics, including tandem devices. These combine semiconductor technologies in pursuit of higher conversion efficiency.
“We anticipate that high efficiency tandem PV modules will define the future.”
Mark Widmar · May 2023
The following year, First Solar inaugurated the Jim Nolan Center for Solar Innovation in Ohio. Its 2024 review also recorded the start of ramping a perovskite development line at the Perrysburg campus. These were investments in the work between an appealing scientific result and a product a customer can buy.
Widmar does not need to be the scientist at the bench for those choices to be revealing. The CEO helps decide which experiments receive a building, staff, and time. In an industry pressed by price competition, research asks for money now in return for a possibility later. His job includes deciding how much patience the balance sheet can afford.
The obligation after the sale
There is another long interval in this business, stretching from the sale of a module to its eventual retirement. First Solar established its global recycling program in 2005, six years before Widmar arrived. He inherited that commitment along with the production lines and the financial statements.
The company’s recycling process is designed to recover semiconductor material as well as bulk materials such as glass. It says more than 90 percent of module materials can be recovered for reuse. That is a claim about the recycling process, rather than a promise that every panel sold has already found its way back.
of module materials recoverable for reuse through First Solar’s recycling process.
Recycling gives the story a timescale that quarterly earnings cannot quite contain. Products leave the factory, work elsewhere, and eventually create another task. A company promising to stand behind its technology needs arrangements for that later chapter. Widmar’s tenure occupies one stretch of a commitment begun before his appointment.
Still doing the arithmetic
By 2026, Widmar had been CEO for a decade. His responsibilities had also widened outside First Solar: he joined Albemarle’s board effective February 26, taking committee roles involving executive compensation, talent, operations, sustainability, and capital. Another industrial company had chosen to put his experience around its boardroom table.
His recent public conversations have kept returning to American manufacturing. A July 2026 podcast recorded at the Reindustrialize conference explored automation and the factory workforce. In September, he joined Oren Cass on the American Compass podcast to discuss domestic solar production. The subject connects technology choices to the communities and suppliers that support them.
The operating results supply a dated checkpoint rather than a final verdict. First Solar reported second-quarter 2026 sales of $1.06 billion and net income of $423 million. Its contracted backlog stood at 45.1 gigawatts at June’s end. Widmar said cumulative global module sales had passed 100 gigawatts.
The figures sit beside continuing demands for capital, research, and execution. A large backlog brings years of work still to perform. A research program carries questions still to answer. The finance executive’s habits remain relevant precisely because making more panels does not remove the need to choose carefully.
Back in 2016, the immediate choice was what to stop. Series 5 disappeared from the plan, and First Solar committed itself to the factory work that followed. Ten years later, that missing number remains an unusually clear introduction to Widmar: an accountant given responsibility for a future that would have to be manufactured.