Leadership Profile: Tom Werner (Part 10)

Friday, April 20, 2007 Related Content Share/Send | 1 comment

The core of SunPower’s success has been its dominance of the high efficiency solar cell. Tom breaks down the marketplace by product type, and explains where SunPower fits into the picture.

SM: Is your technology the most efficient on the market today? TW: We are the highest efficiency in the world, although Sanyo is close. The rest of the market can be classified as medium efficiency. There is also a new technology emerging called thin films, which uses a thin film on a substrate to convert sunlight into energy. You can segment the market into high efficiency which is really SunPower and to a degree Sanyo, then your medium efficiency products, and finally the thin film products.

SM: Are you still selling to a small set of customers like the original channel partners? How do you reach commercial real estate developers and condominium developers? TW: As we were ramping up production, we were also refining our strategy. We brought on a great mix of people from the solar industry and various tech companies, and our strategy involved our participation in the outbound channel because we believe we could lower the overall cost to the point that incentives are not necessary.

At that point the market becomes incredibly big, and you are then considered “mainstream”. So we looked at what we would need to do to compete in this mainstream market, and we felt that owning a channel, creating a brand by virtue of owning the outbound channel, and simplifying the way people bought solar products was a good idea.

Over the course of a couple of years, we have diversified our customer list substantially, and we have invested in the outbound channel in North America by the way we partner with dealers and installers. We also bought PowerLight, which gave us a large scale systems designer and project management, post-sales support company.

We have also vertically integrated and it is now segmented by end market. In residential we have hundreds of dealer partners, whereas large buildings, commercial power plants and public works we sell through PowerLight or other partners.

SM: How big was PowerLight when you bought it? TW: About the same size as SunPower was in 2006.

SM: SunPower did $236 Million in 2006 revenues. This was a massive jump from the $78 Million 2005 revenues. In 2006, they have also become profitable, with a $26 Million Net Income. Looks like a very strong ramprate, and a lot of growth in the future.

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