Bulgaria's Alfa Finance Holding Plans To List PV Panels Maker Solarpro on Sofia Bourse, Raise its Output Capacity, Regional Profile

Solarpro is 80%-owned by local publicly traded mineral extracting and processing company Kaolin, which is part of the portfolio of Alfa Finance Holding. The rest of the equity is held by Solarpro CEO Nikolay Berov.

"In the near future, when the market conditions allow, we plan for Solarpro to start trading on its own on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange," Alfa Finance Holding Managing Board Chairman Ivo Prokopiev said in a statement.

The project has absorbed over 20 million euro ($29.5 million) in investment so far, Prokopiev said.

Solarpro (www.solapro.bg), set up in 2007, on Tuesday inaugurated a PV panels factory in Silistra, on the Danube river. Its full projected design capacity of 18 megawatts (MW) per year is expected to be reached by the end of 2010, a year later than originally expected.

The vision of Solarpro's main shareholder is to transform it into a vertically-integrated business for the manufacture and operation of power generation systems using solar energy as well as other renewables, the statement said.

Through subsidiary companies, Solarpro plans to deploy several solar parks in Bulgaria and neighbouring countries with total installed capacity seen exceeding 100 MW by the end of 2012, Alfa Finance Holding said in the statement.

Over the same timeframe, the annual production capacity for PV panels is expected to reach 100 to 150 MW.

In August, the first stage of Solapro’s PV power plant in the village of Yankovo, in northeastern Bulgaria, was completed, delivering an installed capacity of 338 kilowatt-peaks.

The plant has been successfully connected to the grid of the E.ON-owned regional electricity distributor. The facility, with nominal power of 2.4 megawatt-peaks, will be the largest PV park in the country when it reaches full operational capacity by the end of 2009, Solarpro said on its website.

Alfa Finance Holding (www.alfafinance.bg) provides financial services in Bulgaria and neighbouring Macedonia. It is also active in real estate management, transport and mining. The group employs some 3,000 people.

($=0.684 euro)