On the road to IPO, Enphase Energy doubles sales

Ucilia Wang — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:08:25 +0000

Enphase Energy, which makes solar electronics and filed for an IPO last June, is still waiting for the right time to make its public market debut. But in the meantime, it’s been boosting its sales. The company more than doubled its 2011 revenues and is moving into a larger headquarters, according to a filing.

The company generated $149.5 million in revenues during 2011, compared with $61.7 million during 2010. At the same time, Enphase widened its net losses during the same period, to $32.3 million from $21.8 million.

Most of the 2011 revenues came from sales within the U.S. while 12 percent came from Canada. The company also started selling in European countries such as France and Italy in the fourth quarter. The majority of the revenues for 2012 should still come from the U.S., while the rest will come from Canada and Europe, the company said. Enphase expects to post more losses in 2012 given its need to put more money into scaling up its production and sales.

Enphase, founded in 2006, develops microinverters, which are attached to each solar panel to monitor power output and convert the direct current from the solar cells inside the panel to alternating current for feeding the grid. The Petaluma, Calif., company is a pioneer in carving out a market for microinverters, which also has gained more converts thanks to a growing number of microinverter makers. The conventional design of a solar electric system calls for pairing an inverter with about a dozen solar panels, which is a centralized approach that Enphase and other microinverter developers say is less effective at tracking and improving the power output of each solar panel.

However, microinverters are more expensive than central inverters, so a key to popularizing them involves convincing installers that adding the cost of microinverters is a worthy upfront investment because they can get more power out of the solar electric system during its lifetime.

Since its IPO filing, Enphase has raised a private round of $21.86 million to support its expansion plans while waiting for an optimal time to go public. Though it was early to the market with an innovative product, it’s since facing a growing challenge from not just startups but also major inverter makers such as SMA Technology and Power-One. SMA plans to launch a microinverter this year. Power-One introduced its own version last year. SunPower plans to package microinverters from SolarBridge Technologies to its solar panels starting this year.

Enphase is moving into a new and larger headquarters in Petaluma, though it won’t completely move out of its current space until the second quarter of this year. The company outsources manufacturing to two companies: Flextronics and Phoenix Contact.

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The dilemma of creating and cutting solar jobs

Ucilia Wang — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:31:32 +0000

Both job creation and layoffs are particularly sensitive topics during a weak economy, let alone an election year when candidates all claim to have the best antidotes to put people back to work. So the layoffs of about 200 out of roughly 300 workers at Amonix’s North Las Vegas solar equipment factory this month raised questions not just about the company’s well being but also its promise to bring lots of jobs to the local economy.

Through its manufacturing service provider, Flextronics, Amonix cut its staffing at the factory by two-thirds so it could modify the production equipment for making a new product later this year. From Amonix’s point of view, the company, backed by Kleiner Perkins, is doing what is necessary to make a new product that it plans to launch later this year, said Carla Pihowich, vice president of marketing and government affairs, on Tuesday. The plan is to start hiring more people in the second half of this year, she said. “It’s really a temporary scale-down only to scale back up,” she said.

The California-based company designs giant solar panels mounted on a mechanical arm to track the sun’s movement throughout the day. Inside each panel is a series of modules that contain lenses that concentrate the sunlight up to 500 times onto solar cells to produce power. The current panel runs 77-foot by 49-foot and produces 60 KW. Amonix won’t provide details about its new system until it’s ready to launch it, Pihowich said.

Factory re-tooling is a common step for any manufacturer who wants to roll out new products, cut manufacturing costs or both. The changes at Amonix’s plan will include “a bit more automation” to make solar energy equipment that will be more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity and cost less, Pihowich said.

She also noted that the time is right to make the transition partly because it has completed delivery for a major project – a 30 MW solar farm being built in Colorado by Cogentrix that received a $90.6 million federal loan guarantee.

Green jobs

Amonix held an opening ceremony for its $18 million factory only in May last year. So it’s making a big change in staff and machinery only after having operated for a relatively short period of time. That certainly doesn’t look good, particularly when many local and state political leaders who, along with the company, were eager to tout the jobs the new factory would provide less than a year ago. Its then CEO, Brian Robertson, who died during an airplane crash right before Christmas, said at the time that the company had committed to creating 278 jobs but ended up hiring roughly 300 workers for the factory.

But will the company re-fill the job count back to around 300? That’s not for certain. Amonix promises to re-hire more people starting in the second half of this year. The number of new hires will depend on sales and shipment demand from customers, but Pihowich declined to give an estimate on how many.

For those who felt fortunate to have lined up work at the factory, the layoff announcement was crushing. As Las Vegas Sun reported, some workers felt blindsided by how short-term their employment turned out to be. A local official told the paper that workers were brought on to handle a major project, so the positions were supposed to be temporary.

Amonix will need many more large orders to keep its factory going for the long run. The company declined to talk about the status of other projects and contracts, however. It’s worth noting that the company opened the factory during a year when the solar market experienced a glut of conventional solar panels and saw wholesale prices for them falling by 40-50 percent. That affected the sales of other types of solar technologies as well.

So if re-tooling the factory and reducing payrolls are necessary to maintain the company’s health and its growth, then they certainly need to be done. But the process comes at the expense of those who were counting on Amonix for more, not fewer, jobs.

Photo courtesy of Amonix

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On the road to IPO, Enphase Energy doubles sales

The dilemma of creating and cutting solar jobs