Solar Electronics Startup SolarEdge Files for $125M IPO

SolarEdge could be the next balance-of-systems startup to go public.

The S-1 IPO Registration Statement for solar electronics builder SolarEdge's $125 million initial public offering has landed. (Renaissance Capital reports the figure at $125 million. Last year, Bloomberg suggested a target of more than $100 million.)

It's a positive (and not unexpected) event for the solar electronics sector and the solar industry as a whole. (We recently named SolarEdge as a company that could make it through the IPO window in 2015 -- here's our recent forecast of IPO hopefuls.)

Founded in 2006, SolarEdge has raised more than $40 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Opus Capital Venture Partners, Walden International, Genesis Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, ORR Partners, JP Asia Capital Partners and General Electric’s GE Energy Financial Services. One of its largest customers is SolarCity. 

SolarEdge takes a different, distributed approach to conditioning the power from rooftop solar modules, and its business is growing rapidly. Atypical of many recent pre-IPO hopefuls, SolarEdge had $5.9 million in profit in the last six months of 2014.

MJ Shiao's list of notable stats from the S-1

GTM's Director of Solar Research has perused the document and extracted some salient stats.

SolarEdge at IPO versus already-public Enphase

The leader in the module-level power electronics industry is publicly traded Enphase, which essentially created the microinverter market, and which shipped $105 million in product last quarter.

Some more key numbers from the SolarEdge S-1

MJ Shiao notes, "A successful IPO would give SolarEdge a significant war chest to tackle traditional inverter manufacturers weakened by European market woes and global pricing pressure. In the past year, SolarEdge has gained tremendous traction in the U.S. residential market, where its market share was 26 percent in the third quarter of 2014 according to GTM Research's latest U.S. PV Leaderboard." Shiao added, "SolarEdge will have to go head-to-head with Enphase, which is still fresh from a record quarter and year, as well as ABB, SMA and newcomers to the module-level power electronics (MLPE) space like LG."

He continued, "Globally, we see a huge opportunity for MLPE, growing from less than 4 percent of global annual inverter shipments in 2014 to more than 11 percent by 2018. In 2015, we expect total combined MLPE shipments to well exceed 2 gigawatts. Furthermore, we expect the U.S. residential market to continue growing at 50 percent to 55 percent year-over-year ahead of the federal Investment Tax Credit cliff in 2017 -- a strong foundation and growth opportunity for MLPE vendors."





Source: The Microinverter and DC Optimizer Landscape, 2014