The FIFA World Cup has come to an end with Spain crowned as the champions for the first time in their country’s history. The play in the final was less than inspiring, but the event was not without its interesting stories. One of those stories was about a Chinese solar company joining the ranks of Budweiser, Castrol, Continental and McDonalds as official sponsors of the sporting event.

That company is Yingli Solar as a visit to their web site makes clear. As a sponsor, they received at least eight digital billboards during each of the 64 World Cup matches, as you can see here in a company photo. I noticed it a few times, did you?

But the bigger questions are: how much money did they spend and was it worth it? Although the company has declined to state the exact amount of the spend, there are a few clues.

They spent how much?

Bloomberg New Energy Finance asked a similar question to Judy Tzeng Lee, Yingli’s director of corporate development for an article titled “Great strike or own goal for solar manufacturer”?” Here’s an excerpt:

"Lee declined to say exactly how much Yingli spent on its sponsorship, but said that nearly all of the company’s 2010 marketing budget will go toward its World Cup efforts. Marketing will be about 2 percent of Yingli’s 2010 projected revenue, she added.

Based on the firm’s projected 950-1,000MW of shipments for the year and assuming an approximate $2/W price, Yingli’s total spend could easily total $30-40m."

IEG, who apparently helped FIFA prepare their sponsorship packages, put the cost of Yingli’s sponsorship at $10-25m, according to an article in Business Management.

BNEF thought the presence of a clean energy company as world Cup sponsor no doubt signals the sector has achieved a certain degree of size and maturity, but they wondered if it was worth it given the niche audience that Yingli is targeting. A week before the Cup ended, Helena Kimball, head of marketing communications at the San Francisco office of Yingli Green Energy Americas, told the New York Times that the company planned “to do a complete analysis” after the World Cup to determine whether the sponsorship achieved its goals. Ms. Kimball noted that traffic to the Yingli Web increased so dramatically that it crashed a few times. Was it worth it?

Yesterday, the company said that the World Cup sponsorship helped it a secure a potential credit facility of 36bn Yuan ($5.3bn) from the state-owned Hebei Branch of China Development Bank. Once details are ironed out and the deal is finalized, the credit facility will support Yingli Group’s PV related businesses in China and overseas.

BNEF noted that Yingli’s shares declined 6 percent the day the sponsorship was announced and were down nearly 22 percent since the announcement. However, their stock actually didn’t decline as steeply as other large publicly-traded solar companies over that same period.

So what do you think? If you were the Chief Marketing Officer for a company manufacturing solar PV cells and modules, would you recommend spending your entire year’s marketing budget on a sponsorship of the World Cup?

Image Credit: Gero Breloer, AP

Reprinted with permission from The Inspired Economist