Over the past years, Bosch Solar Energy has tried unsuccessfully to achieve a competitive position. Due to global overcapacity, which has since become huge, nearly the entire industry is sustaining heavy losses.

Dr. Stefan Hartung, the chairman of the Bosch Solar Energy AG supervisory board and member of the Robert Bosch GmbH management board responsible for the Energy and Building Technology business sector, sums up the situation as follows: "Despite extensive measures to reduce manufacturing cost over the past year, we were unable to offset the drop in prices, which was as much as 40 percent"

As announced in January 2013, the losses of the Solar Energy division came to some one billion euros last year. The division currently employs some 3,000 associates, roughly 850 of them at aleo solar AG and some 150 at CISTech.