U.S. President Donald Trump has removed Turkey from the list of developing countries. This new news is undoubtedly bad news for Turkey’s local manufacturing industry.

Unlike previous trade actions aimed at importing solar energy from China and later Taiwan, the essence of clause 201 is to ensure that solar energy products are not manufactured by relocating factories to the United States.

There are not many countries on the exemption list, but there are some. More than a dozen developing countries are exempted from the GSP (General System of Preferences) list, as long as the volume imported from that country does not exceed 3% a year and the cumulative volume of imports does not exceed 9% are included in the exemption list.

Although Thailand and the Philippines have not been exempted because they have already provided more than 3% of photovoltaic imports, one country on the list has hope for East Asian manufacturers: Turkey.

According to SOLARZOOM, as early as 2013, led by Zhongdian Photovoltaic, there was a rush to build factories in Turkey. At that time, CLP was the first Chinese company to build a plant in Turkey, and planned to produce 300 MW of solar panels. Subsequently, Zhongli Tenghui, Sumeda, Aerospace Machinery and Electricity, Zhongsheng Optoelectronics and other Chinese enterprises also up from 2015 to 2017.

At present, large-scale solar panels factories in Turkey include 300 MW solar panels capacity, 600 MW Aerospace photovoltaic capacity, Smart Energy 400 MW, Suoz Energy 370 MW and so on. Recently, EkoRE 1GW module factories have broken ground and entered the construction cycle. In addition, Turkey’s component capacity adjustment activities include CW Enerji expansion to 420 MW, Bereket Enerji expansion to 500 MW, Suoz Energy’s plan to acquire Greek photovoltaic production facilities and move them to Dilovasi, Turkey, Inosolar’s 100 MW cooperation with SolarWorld, Germany, and so on. Turkey’s component capacity expansion heat continues to rise.

Although the removal of Turkey from GSP will affect the importers of PV modules, this is not necessarily the goal of Trump’s government.