SunPower a solar technology, services, and installation company, today announced that it has closed its strategic acquisition of Sunder Energy (Sunder), a residential solar sales company to create the U.S. residential solar industry’s No. 5 company in installed megawatts, using data from Ohm Analytics.
SunPower CEO T.J. Rodgers said, “This acquisition will immediately raise our revenue to its pre-ITC levels and then on to a new record. In addition, and equally important to us, it brings to us a great sales management team with its state-of-the-art sales business processes. In short, this deal is transformational for SunPower. The new revenue will be generated by Sunder’s 893-person 1099 (dealer) sales force members, which are managed by only 20 Sunder W-2 (permanent) employees, who have already transferred to SunPower. Our current plan shows that this new low-overhead revenue will generate an operating income profit record for us in Q4’25.”
Sunder President Eric Nielsen said, “I am enthusiastic about the marriage of Sunder and SunPower, and I know this sentiment is shared across our company, its sales organization and the industry. Our phones are ringing with salespeople asking about positions on the combined team – we issued 72 invitations since the announcement was made – which is very exciting to me. We are now well positioned across the country to grow rapidly by gaining market share.”
Rodgers commented, “I’ve been asked why it took six months to create the Sunder deal but less than a week to close it. That’s because this deal is about retaining an independent 1099 salesforce and learning from the experience. To that end, we have carefully vetted every aspect of retaining a world-class sales team, from their salary and stock compensation through the HR and IT systems that connect them to us. We even did a one-quarter experiment to run 64 Sunder deals through the SunPower systems and study the reactions of their salesforce. Based on that trial run, the acquisition at the sales level is most simply described as doubling the SunPower salesforce from 841 to 1,734 representatives, while adopting the Sunder sales software and methods on both sides.
Rodgers concluded, “When I was the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor from 1982 to 2016, we acquired 26 chip companies, each of which became a new division at Cypress that joined us because of our wafer fabrication plants and worldwide sales force. During those 26 cycles of learning, we developed a suite of formal specifications on how to perform every aspect of an acquisition. We are now using that playbook to formally integrate Sunder into SunPower using an 10-person leadership team that oversees progress on 10 specified integration tracks run by 18 senior managers, in pairs from each company on each track. In just one week, we have created a database with 60 carefully written integration deliverables from our integration specification. When that list reaches approximately 310 deliverables one month from now, the scope of the acquisition operation will have been fully defined.”
“And when the last of the 310 deliverables is completed about one quarter from now, we will have integrated the two companies with the intent of capturing the full value of Sunder for our shareholders, which will also include every Sunder permanent employee by then. With an elapsed time of 180 days from losses to positive operating income, the SunPower asset acquisition was clearly successful – and this one will be too, but on a faster timetable, now that we know how to dance”, he added.
