Tomczak, Sebastian KlaudiuszSkowrońska-Szmer, AnnaSzczygielski, Jan Jakub2020-10-152020-10-152020-01Tomczak, S.K., Skowrońska-Szmer, A. & Szczygielski, J.J. 2020, 'Is investing in companies manufacturing solar components a lucrative business? A decision tree based analysis', Energies, vol. 12, no. 2, art. 499, pp. 1-27.1996-1073 (online)10.3390/en13020499http://hdl.handle.net/2263/76482In an era of increasing energy production from renewable sources, the demand for components for renewable energy systems has dramatically increased. Consequently, managers and investors are interested in knowing whether a company associated with the semiconductor and related device manufacturing sector, especially the photovoltaic (PV) systems manufacturers, is a money-making business. We apply a new approach that extends prior research by applying decision trees (DTs) to identify ratios (i.e., indicators), which discriminate between companies within the sector that do (designated as “green”) and do not (“red”) produce elements of PV systems. Our results indicate that on the basis of selected ratios, green companies can be distinguished from the red companies without an in-depth analysis of the product portfolio. We also find that green companies, especially operating in China are characterized by lower financial performance, thus providing a negative (and unexpected) answer to the question posed in the title.en© 2020 by the authors. Licensee: MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.QUEST modelsManufacturing companiesRenewable energy sourcesFinancial ratiosChi-squared automatic interaction detector (CHAID)Classification and regression trees (CRT)Quick, unbiased, efficient statistical tree (QUEST)Article