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Leadership Profile: Tom Werner (Part 2)

Tuesday, April 10, 2007 | 5 comments

Here Tom discusses his transition into SunPower. He also provides some basic information about the solar power marketplace.

SM: How far along was SunPower at the time? TW: It was 60% owned by Cypress, and they were at the prototype stage. They were prototyping the high efficiency solar cell for the target market it was going into.

SM: It was pre-revenue? TW: We will get into the history of that. SunPower at the time had some optical sensor revenue, less than a million dollars a quarter. There were no revenues from the target market which dominates our revenues today. We had a proprietary technology, a great team, were well financed, and most importantly had a big market which at the time was a $1.5 or $1.7 B, and had not had a down year in 20 years. It looked very much like an execution play, and I thought I could help the team do that.

SM: When you say it was a $1.5B market, how was the need met before SunPower entered the market? TW: The whole market is turning sunlight into power, and the efficiency varies. At the time there was mainstream efficiency, 15% efficient products which means that 15% of the sunlight which hits the solar cell is turned into power.

There were conventional crystalline and silicon solutions that were all the same; they had the same conversion efficiency. The unique thing that SunPower brought to the market was a new architecture which converted 20% to power, which was a better conversion efficiency. It did what you would have bought solar systems for, it just did it better than anybody else.

SM: Essentially it replaced the existing market with a more efficient product? TW: Right, and at the same time things were changing in the macro market. In certain areas of the world, the market became much more favorable to solar, so our timing was about a 9 on a scale of 1-10. If we had been shipping our product a year or two earlier it would have been a 1 or a 2. The German market really took off.

I was coming over and helping SunPower in early 2003, and in June of 2003 I came over on a full time basis as the CEO of Sunpower.

This segment is part 2 in a 12 part series Segment 3 →
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