Earnings call transcript: Complete Solaria Q4 2024 sees stock rise post-call

Complete Solaria Inc. reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2024, revealing a revenue of $81.1 million and a net loss of $5.94 million. Despite the losses, the company's stock saw a notable aftermarket increase of 4.79%, closing at $1.75. According to InvestingPro analysis, the company's overall Financial Health score is rated as "Weak," with significant concerns about cash burn and debt management. The company is focusing on strategic cost reductions and integration of acquired assets to achieve operating income breakeven by Q1 2025.

Key Takeaways

• Complete Solaria's Q4 2024 revenue reached $81.1 million.
• The company reduced its headcount significantly to cut costs.
• Stock rose 4.79% in aftermarket trading.
• The company aims to break even in operating income by Q1 2025.
• Focus on technology and strategic acquisitions continues.

Company Performance

Complete Solaria's performance in Q4 2024 was marked by a focus on restructuring and cost-cutting. The company reported a revenue of $81.1 million for the quarter, with an annualized revenue of $324 million. Despite a net loss of $5.94 million, the company has been actively working on reducing operational expenses and headcount. The solar industry faces challenges such as high interest rates and market volatility, which Complete Solaria is navigating through strategic initiatives.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $81.1 million for Q4 2024
• Gross Margin: 37%
• Operating Expenses: $35.7 million (GAAP)
• Net Loss: $5.94 million
• Cash on Hand: $13 million

Outlook & Guidance

Complete Solaria projects a revenue of $82 million for Q1 2025 and aims to achieve operating income breakeven. Analyst consensus remains cautiously optimistic, with price targets ranging from $3 to $6 per share. The company continues to explore opportunities in commercial and residential solar markets, leveraging its integration of SunPower (OTC:SPWRQ) assets.

Executive Commentary

CEO T.J. Rogers (NYSE:ROG) emphasized the company's commitment to overcoming current challenges, stating, "Our $5,940,000 quarterly loss will not survive in 2025." He also highlighted the company's strategic vision: "We are going to rebuild a classic iconic company."

Risks and Challenges

• High interest rates affecting solar adoption.
• Volatile consumer solar market with high cancellation rates.
• Competition from other solar companies despite recent industry contractions.
• Economic conditions impacting consumer spending on solar solutions.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts queried the company about its portfolio churn in new homes and the leverage of the SunPower brand. The management addressed potential future acquisitions and outlined their cost reduction strategies.

Complete Solaria's strategic focus on cost management, technology improvements, and market expansion positions it to navigate industry challenges and pursue growth in the coming quarters. For comprehensive analysis of Complete Solaria's financial health, growth prospects, and valuation, access the detailed Pro Research Report available exclusively on InvestingPro, covering over 1,400 US stocks with expert insights and actionable intelligence.

Full transcript - Complete Solaria Inc (CSLR) Q4 2024:

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Good morning, and welcome to Complete Solar's Earnings Call. We will be reviewing our preliminary unaudited 4Q 2024 results, which were issued this morning and appear on our website located at www.completesolar.com. Today's conference call contains projections and other forward looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied in such statements. Also on today's conference call, we may discuss certain non GAAP financial measures and reconciliation of the differences between those non GAAP financial measures and the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the press release issued this morning.

I'll now turn the call over to T. J. Rogers, Complete Solar's Chairman and CEO.

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: J. Rogers:] Good morning. My name is T. J. Rogers.

I'm the Chief Executive and Chairman Executive Chairman of Complete Solar. I'm here in Silicon Valley. I want to be in Utah, but I have 3 board meetings here today and I called this meeting right in the middle of them because that was the timing I needed. So I will introduce Dan Foley, our CFO Dan Myers, our Executive Vice President and General Manager of our New Homes division and Steve Erickson, our EVP GM of the Blue Raven (NASDAQ:RAVN) division. By voice only, I have I'm here to Novix in Silicon Valley, and I've got one channel.

And that's me, and I've got voice for them. Dan, say hello so I can check your voice. Hello, T. J. Oh, my God.

Okay. My connection is a cell phone. All right. Good luck. Okay.

This is the report we sent out. I will refer to certain parts of it. Today, we're going to talk about Q4 'twenty four, which is a month behind us. Unfortunately, it's subject to a full year audit, which is currently in progress. And that audit is currently hampered by the fact we have to recreate as if merged financials for SunPower and SunPower doesn't have complete financials.

So that may take us till mid March. Hence, I'm not waiting till mid March to talk about 2024. So I call this meeting today. That puts me here in Silicon Valley because I get other Board meetings here. I apologize for that.

Because this is a preliminary report and it's unaudited for the reasons I just gave, We're only going to talk about what I think you want to know now, which is how did we do last quarter and here where we think we're going in the current quarter. And that's what all we're going to do today. First of all, accomplishments. We had a great quarter. In our last record our Q3 report to you, we gave you a plan for complete solar.

And that plan was aggressive. It was predicated on a successful $45,000,000 acquisition of business unit assets from Sunpar to form a new company. And the plan had 2 big accomplishments that were required in it. One, that the little company, a $5,500,000 company, would acquire a much bigger company, the SunPower Corporation, which has been around for almost 40 years and it's about 10 times bigger than us. That was one assumption achieved.

And the 2nd assumption in our plan that we wrote in our 3rd quarter report, our revenue would be $80,000,000 in Q4 'twenty four. That is our revenue would jump from $5,000,000 to $80,000,000 in 1 quarter. This is a slide I showed to investors. I talked about all complete Solaria, the trouble we had with private equity. We originally marketed $100,000,000 quarter as the likely quarter.

That turned into be an $80,000,000 quarter, which we announced on 11thirteen. And I was worried about taking a jump from here to here as opposed to a jump from here to here until I watched the response to it, and your response was right here. There's November 12, and your response was favorable. You'll take a solid $80,000,000 and that's where we ended up. I'd like to talk about our accomplishments through the quarter.

I've got a series of bullets on that and a few slides to illustrate it. First of all, the SunPower integration is substantially complete. We're together. We're organized together. We are starting to we've already got down to our headcount.

This is a graph by work week going back to the beginning October. So there's the Q4 we're reporting right there. We started out when we first agreed to merge with 3,499 employees. Within 3 weeks, we were down to 416 in our first org chart and then a week later, 2 weeks later down to 1257. So this is about what the company needed.

We had some people come in on post merger on day 1. We worked that number down. We got the number down to $11.65 and we thought we were there. And then you notice here the number went up. And this is when we started discovering employees that, let's just say, the 2 companies didn't count very well.

And I found 35 Pakistanis that think I'm their CEO. So that count went back in, then we started working on it again. And as of the end of the quarter, we're down to 11 40 employees. Our goal is to get to 980. So I'm claiming major progress from there to there and I'm saying we're getting close to the goal.

And I actually was going to do that. I pointed we've got 2 new divisional gross GMs in place, EVPGMs. Dan Myers, this guy all right, let me go back. I announced about a month ago, he was a star manager from the Blue Raven Systems division. He was a supply is a supply chain expert and he took over new homes for us.

And then more recently, we got Steve Erickson. Steve is a well known figure in Salt Lake, which is Solar Valley, the middle of Solar Valley. In his career, he had 12 promotions from 3 companies between 2011 2024 when he came in. He hit the ground running, wrote me a comprehensive memo the very first week he was there explaining what he saw that he liked and didn't like and I advised him to fix the stuff he didn't like and move on. Okay.

So we've got our We've got our GMs in place. We are forecasting revenue growth next quarter. As you all know, the solar industry has in the winter quarter has the dip. Orders go down. People aren't interested in ordering solar when their roofs are covered with ice.

And I did some research. That number has typically been 5% to 14%. We're going to buck that because we're finally getting our act together and we're going to have a good second quarter. And I'm forecasting $82,000,000 up a little bit from the prior quarter and not down. The last point is the company is almost at its fighting rate.

I went through that with you, showing we're down to 11.40 employees, and we will hit the 980 we need to have. I'll tell you where that number comes from a little bit later. So here's the same slide I already showed you showing the actual against the $80,000,000 forecast last quarter in Q4 and the forecast for the quarter we're in at 82. And I'll just tell you we're confident of that number, and I'll show you why and when I show you the daily revenue charts. We've cut our operating expense by a factor of 2.

That, of course, comes from headcount reduction. Our OpEx was an incredible $94,000,000 in the 3rd quarter. That's because we had most of people from both the companies and a lot of expensive software, dollars 5,000,000 a year for Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), etcetera. We've gone from $94,000,000 in Q3 to $35,000,000 in Q4. For the combined and cost reduced company that I showed you the curve for a minute ago.

I like to look at operating expenses less sales commissions. GAAP requires that you call OpEx to be general sales and administrative. And if you have sales commissions, then they go into OpEx. I like to look at the OpEx without commissions because commissions come in as directly with sales. And I really care about the fixed expense we've got back in the plant also.

In that case, you subtract out the numbers and in Q3, we were at $84,000,000 again an astronomical number. And in Q4, just finished, we had non GAAP expense of $20,000,000 So we actually went down from $80,000,000 to $20,000,000 It's a factor of 4 reduction. And we're planning on dropping another 30% in Q1. That's the $11.40 to $980,000,000 that I showed you earlier. We're also forecasting that our cash we're forecasting this is a big one, income operating income breakeven in Q1 'twenty five.

The words carefully chosen say given our current backlog and cost cutting plan, we're forecasting non GAAP operating income at breakeven in Q1 'twenty five. I can tell you that that number is plus $800,000 And it includes all the expenses we know about, but that's a kind of a fragile margin to predict operating income breakeven. And normally in presentations like this, you give numbers you're absolutely sure of achieving. In this case, we're going to get real close worst case and I'm announcing it sort of putting drawing a line in the sand here, people in the factory listening to what I'm saying, we're going to breakeven in Q1 'twenty five. And we're going to be positive in cash flow.

We raised $80,000,000 for the purpose of buying SunPower for $45,000,000 and having operating expense going forward to build a new company. We bottomed out at $13,000,000 of cash left out of the $80,000,000 in Q4 and will be going up this quarter. Now the so these are the bullets. And now fellow shareholders, the main numbers. I'm going to turn it over to Dan.

Let's nope. I'm not going to turn it over to Dan. She's getting her cell phone so she can set it and she can put it in microphone and we're not and she's got a ring on her phone. We're not going to do that. So I'll give you the numbers.

Again, it's my fault. I call this meeting out of phase with what we wanted to do because of the long audit. Revenue, let me do non GAAP, 81.1%. Our gross margin, you notice, has been ugly and up and down. Our gross margin is 37%.

And you notice our GAAP gross margin is the same thing. So we're we've kind of flushed the ugly out of the gross margin chain. Our operating expenses are $35,700,000 GAAP and non GAAP. Our operating expense is less commission, dollars 19,700,000 GAAP and non GAAP. So for our non GAAP loss, excluding extraordinary costs, which blew up the GAAP number, was 5,940.

So you can say then this is you see the small company and then there's the new company, this is their Q1. We've now been defined. We're a $324,000,000 company that's losing money and needs not to lose money as quickly as possible. That's our next goal. And we got $13,000,000 in the bank, and we expect it to grow.

We acquired SunPower on what I call a Noah's Ark model, explain that in a minute. I already explained the leaning out process we've gone to and the fact we're not quite yet at our goal. I've mentioned that we are going to grow next quarter and that, that number is conservative. I'm pretty confident in it. Now what happened was when we raised money, the $80,000,000 with that plan and then after we had a flurry of cancellations on the Sunpar side because of the bankruptcy, we ended up with the Q1 being $80,000,000 I'm pretty happy for that and solid.

So we're going to move forward from that number. Now that says, if you look at our model for the company, instead of having 1225 employees, we're going to have 980. So that's the goal we're enforcing. At 11:40, we're actually below our first goal and we set a new goal that was more aggressive of headcount of 980. To illustrate that to employees, I actually have shown this slide and I will show it again on Friday.

The Ark, Noah's Ark Merger Theory is actually a typical Silicon Valley startup plan in disguise. Instead of a big company in trouble asking for and getting too much money, SunPower was trying to raise when I came in $750,000,000 And of course, what's worse than wanting to raise $750,000,000 The answer is actually getting it. Then you owe interest on it and it burdens you forever. And so that's not the right way to do it in my opinion. The Arc Theory, which I used once back in Cyprus, we did 20 acquisitions in Cyprus, asserts this, your old company has great assets.

If I look at what I inherited was $80,000,000 it's enough to make the company profitable. Your old company has great assets, get venture funding for those assets, in our case $80,000,000 and build a new organization that can make profit with what you've got. So Noah's Ark, which is to protect us during floods and we're having a flood of interest rate problems right now in the financial markets, got smaller and it's now got 980 seats. By the way, believe it or not, this is actually a 4 inches thick oak hull on a 500 foot long Noah's Ark model that's built in Williamsburg, Kentucky to make claim to biblical standards. Okay.

A little bit more detail on revenue. This is a picture of my daily revenue report. So the dots are 91 dots a quarter. We came in with $100,000,000 Street number I showed you. And we created our beginning of quarter plan, which is the daily plan.

For example, you can see the weekends and holidays in here. So it's a tight well conceived plan. We took off on the plan and then we got behind. And right here, we said that we're not going to make the BOQ beginning of quarter plan. We need another plan.

So we did what we call an end of quarter plan. We decided what level we could get to and have the backlog for the next quarter after that, hence my certainty on the $82,000,000 this quarter. We picked that target. No more fancy, we took a straight line and we started tracking daily to it. And this was a pretty good quarter.

The troops did a great job. I was worried because it was the first test and they passed it. As a matter of fact, right there, you notice it goes flat. That says in the middle of this week, instead of working like hell trying to get up here and not quite making it, we told them, you worked hard, you'd like to have a 4 day weekend for the vacation, have a nice weekend, bam, and we went flat. And of course, revenue that we could have accrued there became available to us quickly in the Q2.

Okay. This is for the whole company. New Homes, different kind of story. They had an aggressive plan. They got behind.

They had a new plan. In fact, this way, they were spiking here. They probably could have made the original plan. But what they did was they got to where they needed to get for the street. This is their component of the street number of the $80,000,000 number.

And they also, like everybody else took the end of the quarter off. Great quarter. And we have Blue Raven. That was their first and second expectation. They redefined the quarter as well.

Everybody did and they stayed ahead of it for the rest of the quarter and they also took off. And in this case, I think they probably could have made the original plan. So great quarter. Here's the other story, dealers. So we have a dealer network that buys orders from dealers and they had a modest plan of $17,000,000 They started slow and kept on slow and they reduced their plan a big amount.

The reduction from $100,000,000 to $80,000,000 for our plan, half of that was from the smallish division missing its plan by a lot. So we sized up. We're a new company. This quarter defines who we are. And we said this quarter, Q4 defines who we are, and we said we're cutting our headcount from 140 to 5 in the dealer division.

So instead of having 2 divisions coming from SunPower New Homes and Dealer, we had new homes only and then Blue Raven, and that's now the company. And we took some of the stars and merged them in Blue Raven. So here's our org chart. So this half of the company right here is 2 divisions now that are the company. They have 921 people.

And this, although it's got a lot more boxes, it says a lot fewer people, 219% or 19%. And I'm in I should have drawn that circle up around me. We're all in that. We're support. These guys make the money.

We do things for them. We're CFO, Chief Administrative, Legal, HR, Information Technology. But I'd like to introduce Venky. Say it for me. Sundar Rissen.

Sundar Rissen. I'm usually pretty good with any names, but his is kind of simple enough. Venky came from Enphase, where he ran an important division for them. And before that, he came from Cypress Semiconductor, he ran all IT. And this is going to be transformative for our company.

I'll add Sankey to be here. He lives in Silicon Valley with me today. And we have another Senior VP I will write about later. We have a new Quality VP. His name is Surinder Betty, and he came from Lucid Motors (NASDAQ:LCID).

So he actually was at SunPower very early in his career. He's also worked at Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT), which is a known high quality Silicon Valley company. And Enlucid, an automotive company. And automotive companies have as a group of companies better quality control than I think any other group of companies perhaps, maybe semiconductors might be up there as well. So anyway, we've done some bolstering of our administrative side.

We've got 2 divisions. These are the guys that make the numbers for us and our overhead is measured on headcount is 19% of our population. Okay. Here's an important point. The Board honored our 4th quarter performance with a modest $1,140,000 bonus, 1.4 percent of revenue even in a loss quarter, which is rare.

My rule number 1 of bonuses, you never get bonus for losing money. But our performance was so good, that the Board agreed with me that we should do something. This is 1.14 for the entire company. That is our loss could have been that much less, but we decided to make the loss bigger to reward the employees. Management, we chose the bonus money that went to all hands equally.

So it's $1,000 ahead to recognize that it was rank and file employees who made the quarter. We sit I sit here in Silicon Valley and I work a lot of hours, but the rank and file made this quarter for us. The management team owes significant restricted stock, I'd point it out. If they ever want to gripe about, gee, only $1,000 for me and that's a tiny fraction of my salary. Management's got a lot of restricted stock and we're waiting for them to get rewarded when the market says they meet and beat the street a bunch of quarters in a row and then they'll be well rewarded.

So this is a great way to do something for the workers now and remind management that they've still got to perform. Our $81,100,000 revenue last quarter redefined our company with annualized revenue of $324,000,000 and a loss of $5,400,000 When I did the bullet points upfront, there are 8 of them. And all I could think was this is really good. It's bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And all I could think of was, Muhammad Ali in one of his first fights.

He fought a bar fighter in England. The guy's name is Brian London. Guy's one of those big square jawed, mean looking guys. And Ali, the kid from Louisville, Kentucky, went to London, and they're all worried. And they said, this guy is no finesse.

He will walk directly at Ali, put him in a corner, and we've got him in a corner. He will punch him once, and he'll drop. That was that was the worry about the fight. Anyway, in the Q3 of that fight, Ali never got touched, never got touched. He was floating around and and and the big guy kind of couldn't keep up with him and Ali went up and went bam, bam, bam, bam, 12, 12 punches in 2.98 seconds.

And the big guy was standing there bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And Ali just walked to the center of the ring. The guy felt flat in his face into the ring. So that's how I felt about those bullet points. So I had Ali in my mind, and I want to remind you and the employees that our $5,940,000 quarterly loss will not survive in 2025, little rhyme there.

Also, I want to thank shareholders. You've stuck with us. You've given us money. We are going to rebuild a classic iconic company, and I want to remind all of you how important Sunpar used to be. You got it wasn't run well at the end by a lot.

There was contention between the divisions of the company and I would have been unhappy too. But SunPower is an iconic company. They got founded in 1985. They you can see here the black the black squares on the wing of the airplane. This airplane's wingspan is bigger than the 747 and it's completely powered by SunPower solar cells that were made in Sunnyvale, California.

It takes off under its own power 14 electric motors. So it was the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) of airplanes way back in 1999. What amazes me about this airplane that really talks about the power of the sun, which I remember when Elon Musk brought out the Tesla and everybody said golf court, electric car. All right. So you bring out the test and you find out you can lay rubber for 2 blocks.

The Tesla Plaid today does 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds. You can take the biggest muscle car GTO supercharged of any of the older cars and it will blow it off the road. And these guys did the same thing way back in 1999 because this airplane flew to a record of 96,863 feet and that record still stands. And I'll point out one of the challengers to that record is the F-fifteen, which is a fighter plane been around. It's a Mach 2.5 fighter and is capable of accelerating.

It's 1 of 2 airplanes we have capable of accelerating while climbing vertically. And its service ceiling is 72,000 feet. So this is iconic picture of the power of the sun. It's already happened. We talk about NIM, net electricity metering, and our NIM is being cut back, meaning that the grid is no longer giving money back to people who are in California anyway for people who have solar.

Why is that? Well, that's actually good news. Solar right now in the middle of the day produces more power than they need and they're not going to pay for it. We have a solution for that. It's called a battery.

I'm actually in a battery company right now in Silicon Valley, not the one that's going to make our batteries. But we have systems today that will make money and provide technology people need. Right now, we're selling solar systems, good ones. We're using good components. My background is technical and we're going to work on technology as well.

So at the end, the loss will not survive in 2025 and we're going to bring back a great tech we're going to create a great technology company. You can say bring back but create. Okay, that's it. We're ready for questions.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you, T. J. As a reminder to our audience, you may send questions to us via the text box at the bottom of your screen. Our first question today comes from Derek Soderbergh from Cantor Fitzgerald. Two questions actually.

The first one is, how is the portfolio churn trending in the new homes business? And what's the plan to grow that business?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: First of all, that businesses are most are more profitable of our 2 businesses. Right now, it's revenue is looking flat. We have new orders we're getting. We had a bunch of cancellations. So the lake went down, and we're now putting filling the lake back up.

We will be up by the end of the year in new homes having survived the bankruptcy and the hardest hit part of SunPower during his bankruptcy was new homes.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Derek's second question was how will CSLR effectively leverage the SunPower brand? Do you have any new plans?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: I do. And this little teaser here is part of it. Right now, I want to get more braggable in the corporation, but we are going to make use of the name. By the way, we were attacked in court to try to take the name we want. So we own the name.

We have the division, the home division of SunPower still with us and some other people who are in the dealer division are still with us in Blue Raven.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you. The next question is, we understand you have contracts with Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX). Is there any more commercial deals in the pipeline? And how do you view that business?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: Okay. I don't unfortunately, I don't have the picture here. Normally, I keep an appendix with all my pictures in it. There's a fantastic picture of a Starbucks and they've got an awning. So you're looking at a 2, 3 storey high Starbucks with an awning that sticks out over the entire parking lot, all solar and it's glass on glass solar.

So some panels today are made with glass and then the silicon and then below that another layer of glass. So when you look at them, you can see right through parts of them. That's a Starbucks got a 50,000 watt system. We have 50 7 Starbucks we've dealt with. I think it's great business.

But right now, I got 2 divisions. I got Blue Raven and they're putting homes all over America throughout the Midwest included. And then I've got New Homes. The New Homes division is capable of doing the light commercial. And that may be the place or we may acquire a company that is in that business.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you. The next question is, the company has moved through its initial integration and cost reduction quickly post acquisition of the SunPower assets. Can you discuss incremental cost reduction efforts and how much more should the market expect on that front?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: How much incremental cost reduction should we expect? What you don't know is we're actually ahead of that game. The reason last quarter at a $5,900,000 loss was that curve. And we had the high part of the curve spending a lot of money then coming down. And the average of the quarter was the high part and the low part.

We're entering the new quarter low. So that cost cutting is there already built in. Where else? We're still paying some rent that we need to get rid of. We still have some software packages we need to stop paying on.

But by and large, the heavy lifting is done, cutting costs another 30%.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you. In the similar vein, you announced achieving operating income breakeven in the Q1 of 2025. What are the risks to this?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: The risk is we don't do it and that I'm making an aggressive announcement, which is atypical. As I said earlier, if you could see the spreadsheets actually are in here, but I'm not going to show them. Our planned profit, including the ability to pay another bonus, our planned profit is $800,000 Disappears like that if you screw something up. But if we miss, I don't think it will be by much. And if we make it, and I think it's more likely than not we will make it, it's not a given.

It will be a big deal. We'll celebrate.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you. The next question is with regards to additional acquisitions. What is your appetite? And if you are seeking them, would targets be bolt on to current positions or seek to expand your footprint and offerings?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: Give me the choice he gave me. I heard that. What are the two choices he gave me? Okay. On expanding, I that can be good or bad.

Problem is you've had in the last 2 years, you've had 70 solar companies go out of business. Now you can argue the interest rate is directly what people pay for solar, double the interest rate, double the payment. And therefore, high interest rates, the inflation that we've unfortunately inflicted on ourselves has harmed a lot of solar companies. And that's 70. I got a list.

It's in alphabetical order and SunPower is on the list. Having said that, solar companies are not run as tightly as other companies, point 1. And point 2, the backlog of solar companies, the orders is not as solid. For example, in the chip business, we would take backlog and if some and we would make chips for somebody, not custom, just a bigger number for another company and they didn't take them. After that point in time, they would pay a down payment.

And therefore, backlog is pretty sacred in our company as most chip companies, you were locked in the last 30 days to take or pay. So you had you were informed 30 days before the order is going to ship, the order is going to ship and that was your last chance to bail out. Back backlog isn't solid like that in solar. You actually have teams of people calling other people and how are things going and you have a real rate like 20% of people say, I kind of changed my mind. And it's a consumer thing and you can't be the big bad corporation pounding on some poor homeowner somewhere.

So for that reason, solar companies shrink and you need to get bigger and smaller by huge factors. So you can't take a solar company that's big and doing well and buy it at a high price. So I look more at potential of companies than I look more at people. And if you've got a solid company that has good practices, that has customers who love them and hasn't eaten up a lot of cash like SunPower ate up, then you've got something worth acquiring. So I look for companies like that.

I look for companies that we acquired a company a year ago. And I talked to the founder. And I said, we're thinking about acquiring and I said, send me your deck. The guy's name is Cole Farmer, he's still with us. And he said, I don't have a deck.

And I said, I'm thinking, how in the hell can you not have a deck? And he said, we never raised any money. We funded our first systems and then the money from that funded the other systems. And I thought my exact thoughts in that Sunday afternoon phone call, there's a real man. He didn't run to Wall Street and get paid and gripe about the economy.

He goes and makes money. So that's the kind of company if we acquire and we will acquire if we can. Non indigenous growth is great, but extra growth through acquisition is fine. That's more like what I'm looking for, not some high flying company or new capability. The consumer commercial rather you talked about earlier, that's a more stable business.

You're now dealing with other companies. And that's a business that if we found somebody that was good at it, and that means they make bigger systems. So now talking not 10 kilowatts on your roof, we're talking about 1,000,000 watts in a field with control of the angle of the panels to follow the sun. That could be another option. Technology is another option.

Getting a technology that gives us a better panel or gives us the better panel, and I'm actually working with companies on that right now, and that would be something else. So we're not just going to grow. There were companies in Salt Lake that tried that, just sort of agglomerating companies, and they found out a bunch of small weak companies equaled 1 big weak company and it didn't work out. That's long answer.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you. I have a longer one with respect to the dealers division. It sounds like you shrank the dealers division to create more profitable growth in the long term. Can you please discuss the strategy and your outlook for that segment?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: It was a real tight call right at the end to stay in the dealer business or not. The way the dealer business works is you have people who sell orders. They go through their process, which is complex, and they get a homeowner to sign a contract. I will buy your system. Then they can sell that deal to a company that installs and is a full service company like ours.

And amazingly enough, that order is worth 30% or even more sometimes of the value of the order. That is getting the order cost you 30% of revenue upfront. Then you deal with the guy who changes his mind halfway through. Therefore, it's an unstable business and there are tectonic shifts in the business where that goes into fashion, goes out of fashion. And what I know from our own experience with the division, we merged into the other division and my company before that, Complete Solar, the mother of this by the way, oddly enough, Complete Solar, the mother of this company is grand total of maybe 60 people out of 1,000 and we're spread all over the company including my position and we're not the company anymore.

We are the money and the funding and the guidance for the company. So we're looking for solid things. It's not quite reasonable to use Warren Buffett's name here, but we're thinking that way when we look at what we can acquire and bring in and which businesses we should grow. And right now, dealer does not look like one of those businesses we grow. And by the way, I want to point out that our Blue Raven division is its own dealer.

It has a large group of salespeople, and we get our own orders, and therefore, we get all the profit going up. So we understand how it works. We understand what it costs. That 30% is not phony. That is it really takes that much money to get the order and keep it.

So right now, that's not where we want to be.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you. It looks like we have 2 more in the queue. Just a reminder to the audience, if you have any additional questions, you can put them in the text box at the bottom of your screen and we will see them there. The next question is, how do you see yourself differentiated versus your peers in the next 6 to 12 months?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: We will be financially stable on a cash flow basis in tough times. So Marine Corps, we're going to come out of this being a difficult company to compete with. In a consumer business, we are going and are now have great consumer ratings. We're going to get better on that. And then the new angle is going to be technology and acquisition, which again, I can't right now I'm working on several technologies and I can't name one for you that I'm ready to move on.

And in acquisitions, we're always looking at acquisitions always.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you. The last question I have here is, can you provide any timing on when your name change to SunPower might occur?

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: I'm surprised that that is a major well, I asked for it, right? I showed you a picture of the airplane. Can't right now. The problem we've got is the SunPower I knew. I was the Chairman of SunPower when it went public in 2000 I think it was 2004.

I was Chairman of SunPower. Cypress Semiconductor Mine Company owned them. And the SunPower I remember that conquered the world and built and put the power in that airplane wasn't the one that was experienced in Salt Lake. It was something that would cause this like if you worked with them. And so I got half the company that doesn't remember SunPower well, but I got a name that's worth $500,000,000 and I got to figure out how to make all that work together.

Conference Moderator, Complete Solar: Thank you very much. That looks like all the questions we have in the queue today. Thank you everyone for joining the call today. You may now disconnect.

T.J. Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Complete Solar: Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.