The most important number in Daqo's upcoming release will not be earnings per share. It will be sales volume, because last quarter the company essentially stopped selling rather than accept prices it viewed as destructive, and this report is the first real test of whether that standoff paid off or simply delayed the pain.

Wall Street currently models a loss of $0.28 per share on revenue of $59.2 million for the June quarter. That would represent a dramatic sequential improvement from the $1.31 per share loss and $26.7 million in revenue Daqo posted in the prior period, when sales volume collapsed to just 4,482 metric tons from 38,167 tons the quarter before. Compared with the year-ago period, revenue is still expected to fall 21.3 percent, but the loss per share is expected to narrow 75.4 percent, a sign that the Street believes the worst of the margin destruction is behind the company even if the top line remains depressed relative to a year ago.

That expectation lines up directly with what management described on the last call. Daqo reaffirmed second-quarter production guidance of 35,000 to 40,000 metric tons and pointed to easing weekly polysilicon price declines and improving module demand heading into the period. The bigger catalyst, though, was a mid-year industry cost-determination model that management suggested could push polysilicon prices to 40 to 45 RMB per kilogram if regulators actually enforced it. This quarter's results will show whether that enforcement materialized in a way that let Daqo resume meaningful shipments at economic prices, or whether the company was forced to keep sitting on inventory.

The stakes are high because the previous call marked a sharp reversal in tone from the optimism of late 2025. An anti-involution consolidation effort that had powered two quarters of narrowing losses fell apart after Chinese New Year, and management shifted from confident recovery talk to an explicit downside scenario in which Daqo would cut utilization and sell below cost if policy enforcement failed to show up. Investors should look closely at gross margin, which swung to negative 521 percent last quarter after a $98.4 million inventory impairment, and at whether sales volume actually rebounded toward historical levels rather than merely inching up from a near-zero base.

Sentiment heading into this report has swung hard. Bearish sentiment among options traders sits at 62.3 percent, compared with just 1.8 percent bearish ahead of the last report, a sign that expectations have been reset sharply lower after the disappointment. The stock has fallen 18.6 percent since the last earnings release while the S&P 500 gained 9.2 percent, a 27.8 percentage point gap that shows the market has clearly punished the company rather than given it the benefit of the doubt. Shares now trade at $14.64, well below the 200-day moving average of $22.31 and sitting in the lower half of the post-earnings trading range between $11.38 and $20.40.

The central question for this report is straightforward. Did China's promised price enforcement translate into real, profitable shipments, or is Daqo still waiting on a policy fix that keeps getting pushed to the next quarter. The answer will determine whether the current consensus estimates represent a genuine inflection or just a smaller version of the same problem.