China's photovoltaic (PV) enterprises have experienced difficulties under the influence of the growth slowdown of international market and trade protectionism since 2012. In this paper, from a new perspective of building a hierarchical network model, by using the minimum spanning tree (MST) technique, the market characteristics of China's PV enterprises was researched. The economic distance in the MST was calculated by using PV enterprises' daily closing price of stocks during the years 2007-2013. With the analysis of the topology of hierarchical network, the community structures of the network are derived and some influential enterprises are identified. It is necessary for PV enterprises to deeply connect and cooperate with each other to cope with market risk. What's more, the key factors that affect the hierarchical network were also studied; the result indicates that assets expansion and the core technology competitiveness are important factors for the development of PV enterprises. In the end, some suggestions are put forward to promote sustainable development of China's PV industry. V C 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.

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