Tom Werner
Analyst · Credit Suisse. Your line is now open
Thanks, Bob and thank you for joining us. On this call we will provide an overview of our first quarter 2019 performance as well as provide an update on various strategic initiatives that we feel will improve our competitive position and margin profile for the year. I'd now like to discuss our Q1 performance in greater detail. Please turn to slide 3. We executed well in Q1, meeting or exceeding our financial targets for the quarter including our adjusted EBITDA forecast. We beat our revenue and megawatt forecast in our upstream SunPower Technology or SPT business and saw strong demand in our global DG business with particular traction in Europe and Australia. I'll provide additional color on each business unit shortly. We also continued to lower operating expenses while further improving our balance sheet through the monetization of our C&I sale-leaseback portfolio, proceeds of which we will receive in the second quarter. Now let me discuss our segment performance in greater detail. First an overview of SunPower Energy Services, our North American DG business. Please turn to slide 4. SPES executed well in the quarter despite the impact of weather and installation delays in certain key markets, which limited megawatt volume. However, we were able to offset this impact due to the prudent management of expenses, improved operational efficiency and a stable pricing environment. The mix of cash and lease was in line with forecast while our loan product continued to gain traction with megawatt volume tripling year-over-year. We added to our new homes backlog, which is now more than 35,000 homes. Important milestone in Q1 was the introduction of our A-Series panels using our new NGT or Maxeon Gen 5 technology. These new products are the industry's first 415-watt rated residential panels and initial customer reaction has been extremely positive. Our ongoing investments in digital are also yielding measurable benefits. We recently previewed a revolutionary instant design software that improves the customer experience while significantly reducing system design time and lowering cost. Finally, we continue to make significant progress on our Equinox residential storage product and remain on plan to launch this offering in the second half of this year. In C&I, we maintained our number one share position with strong momentum in both our direct and CVAR businesses. 2019 remains greater than 80% booked and our pipeline exceeds $3 billion. Forecast this business turning profitable in the third quarter. Our Helix storage solution is selling well as we have now booked 38-megawatt hours of storage projects with high attach rates in California and Hawaii. Our Helix storage pipeline now exceeds 110 megawatts as well. Finally, we launched our P-19 commercial panel in the U.S. market, manufactured in our Oregon facility. As we have discussed in the past we are committed to innovation across the value chain. This includes developing a digital platform to improve the customer experience and reduce installed systems cost. I'd now like to spend a few minutes highlighting an example of how -- of our software innovation called SunPower Instant Design, a new technology we are deploying first in the residential market. Please turn to slide 5. In the retrofit market, we see that homeowners want an optimized design for their home and energy needs. That designing the residential system can be complicated and time-consuming, but every roof is unique. SunPower creates over 100,000 residential solar designs per year to serve this market. With SunPower Instant Design, we built software to create optimized systems quickly and efficiency -- efficiently using machine learning. It does this automatically in seconds using algorithms trained on our existing design library. The algorithm learns with every new system design continuously improving accuracy. The key advantage of this technology is that we are reducing design turnaround time from 30 minutes to less than 60 seconds giving immediate feedback to the customer on optimum system configuration and a location and performance. Homeowners can modify designs online, adding in or subtracting panels while evaluating the impact on energy and build savings. We recently debut the technology at the Google Cloud Next conference in April. We're going to launch our first online experience featuring Instant Design this summer. We believe that SunPower Instant Design and our expanding digital platform will improve performance, reduce overall system cost and streamline solar system delivery. This creates a foundation for further lowering of customer acquisition costs, while still providing customers the flexibility to design a system that's optimized for their home. I'd now like to spend a few minutes providing some additional color on our Safe Harbor program. Please turn to slide 6. As we mentioned in our Capital Markets Day last month, we see a significant opportunity to capitalize on the Safe Harbor provisions. We planned the Safe Harbor modules for both our residential lease business as well as our commercial direct business. Between our two SPES businesses, we expect the Safe Harbor modules sufficient to preserve the 30% ITC or approximately 400 megawatts of business in 2020 and beyond. We believe that SunPower has a distinct advantage in this case due to our vertically integrated business model. This gives us supply chain certainty and predictable cost on proven technology that has the highest quality in the industry and the benefit of exclusion from Section 201 tariffs. For example, under the panel types, we will be safe harboring will be our Maxeon A-Series panel. With an industry-leading power rating of 415 watts, we are confident that the technology will be competitive a few years from now and will enable us to provide our customers with industry-leading performance, while maximizing margins for the company. Also we are currently in substantive discussions with a number of potential financiers for programs that will require minimal use of SunPower capital. We see significant appetite for such investment expect to begin executing financings in the second half of 2019. Now let me discuss our SunPower Technologies business in greater detail. Please turn to slide 7. Our manufacturing team executed well again in Q1 exceeding our shipment guidance and meeting cost and yield targets for the quarter with full fab utilization. Our next-generation Maxeon 5 technology hitting performance goals with solar cell production efficiencies of 25%, and initial installation of tools underwriting for our second line. When line 2 is complete at the end of the year, our Maxeon 5 main plate capacity will be 250 megawatts. Finding sources for further expansion are on track for commitments this summer. Production of our P-Series technology is also going well with our DZS joint venture at 2 gigawatts of capacity in our factory in Oregon now in volume production. Our SPT international sales channels posted strong performance as well. We have retooled our product offering to focus on the DG market. We are now seeing the benefits with DG sales volume, ASPs and margins coming in above plan driven by particularly strong demand in Europe and Australia. DG shipments accounted for close to 60% of our overall volume for the quarter. We also continued to expand our power plant shipment during Q1 with a backlog for the balance of 2019 that exceeds 530 megawatts. Now let me highlight our Q1 SPT international DG market performance. Please turn to slide 8. Europe remains a strong market for us. We have doubled our share there since 2015 with particular strength in Italy, France and Benelux countries. We are seeing very strong demand for our recently launched 400-watt Maxeon panel in Europe and continued demand growth for our P-Series product line including two recently introduced residential-format panels. We also saw strong demand in our Asia Pacific DG markets. Australia was above plan in Q1 as we capitalize on our new residential P-Series product. Japan exceeded its Q1 forecast driven by demand for both Maxeon and P-19 panels. We are seeing rapid demand growth across a number of new South East Asian markets primarily driven by success with our P-19 product in commercial applications. In power plant, we shipped more than 190 megawatts during the quarter between our Maxeon and P-Series products. Given the strong market reactions to our new product portfolio, we are investing to expand our sales footprint across a number of new DG markets and expect to more than triple our Asia Pacific and rest of world shipment volume in 2019. Before turning the call over to Manu for the financials, I would like to provide some comments on our confidence in achieving our 2019 financial forecasts. Please turn to slide 9 while I highlight the key drivers to reach our 2019 adjusted EBITDA target. First volume and scale as I highlighted previously, we are continuing to ramp our NGT and P-Series technology both of which will benefit from cost reduction and volume ramps. We also expect a benefit from our flexible model as we have the ability to adjust our fab's and Modco's output related to our safe harbor program. Finally, we expect to maintain our pricing premium with this cost decline, which will drive gross margin improvement in the second half of the year. We expect the increased volume and scale to account for close to 50% for our second half EBITDA performance. Second technology. On the manufacturing side increased volumes of NGT lowers cost per watt and provides material margin expansion. We also benefit from the continued rollout of our Helix storage platform. The storage remains highly accretive. As I just discussed, we're just beginning to benefit from our digital initiatives such as Instant Design. These initiatives will lower customer acquisition cost improve our lead generation capabilities, drive better operational efficiency. We see these investments driving in more than 20% improvement in our EBITDA performance in the second half of the year. Third cost initiatives. These include our supply chain initiatives for both SPT in our commercial business in North America as well as the continued prudent management and optimization of our operating expenses. Additionally, we expect to lower our cost of capital through our previously mentioned commercial industrial facility with Goldman Sachs, while improving our residential lease margins. We see our cost and finance initiatives accounting for more than 30% of our EBITDA gains in Q3 and Q4. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Manu to review the financials. Manu?