Sunpower Corporation 2016 Annual Report
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SUNPOWER 2016 ANNUAL REPORT ANNUAL 2016 SUNPOWER Corporate Headquarters SunPower Corporation 77 Rio Robles San Jose, California 95134 408.240.5500 sunpower.com Annual Report 2016 ©2017 SunPower Corporation. All Rights Reserved. SUNPOWER, the SUNPOWER logo, and all other trademarks cited herein are the property of SunPower Corporation in the U.S. and other countries as well. Executive Officers Thomas H. Werner President, CEO and Chairman of the Board Changing the Way Our World is Powered Charles D. Boynton With more than 30 years of proven experience, Executive Vice President SunPower is a global leader in solar innovation and and Chief Financial Officer sustainability. Our unique approach emphasizes Ken Mahaffey the seamless integration of advanced SunPower Executive Vice President technologies, delivering The Power of OneTM and General Counsel complete solar solutions and lasting customer Dr. Bill Mulligan value. SunPower delivers outstanding service Executive Vice President and impressive electricity cost savings for Global Operations residential, commercial and Douglas J. Richards power plant customers. Executive Vice President Administration At SunPower, we are passionately committed to changing the way our Board of Directors world is powered. And as Thomas H. Werner we continue shaping the Chairman of the Board future of Smart Energy, we are guided by our legacy Helle Kristoffersen Director of innovation, optimism, perseverance and integrity. Daniel Lauré Director Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Catherine Lesjak SunPower has about 7,000 dedicated, Director customer-focused employees in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South Thomas R. McDaniel Director America. Since 2011, we’ve been majority-owned by Total, the fourth largest* publicly-listed energy Ladislas Paszkiewicz company in the world. Director Julien Pouget For more information, visit sunpower.com. Director Laurent Wolffsheim Director *Based on market capitalization in U.S. dollars at December 31, 2016. Pat Wood III Director Dear Shareholders, We just went through another monumental year for solar with residential, commercial and power plant customers around the globe favoring economic, clean and reliable solar. For those of you following us, you probably know the trends we experienced in 2016: • Solar in the U.S. had its biggest year to date, nearly doubling its annual record with 14,626 megawatts (MWs) installed, according to GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA); • Close to 260,000 people were employed in the U.S. solar industry, twice as many as those in the country’s coal industry; and • Solar and wind are now the same price or cheaper than new fossil fuel capacity in more than 30 countries according to the World Economic Forum. We are witnessing a worldwide shift to renewable energy. The long-term growth prospects are compelling, and as a solar industry veteran, I expect solar energy to become the largest contributor to incremental electricity generation globally. Despite the dramatic shift to solar energy, the industry is currently going through another transition period as it faced a number of challenges last year. Historically, energy policy has been a key driver for us, with policy having a significant impact on the sector. For example, cost reductions drove solar generation towards parity with traditional generation in many markets. As a result, a number of governments either reduced solar incentives, or in some cases, eliminated them, which pressured system pricing. We also saw demand disruption in the U.S. during the last half of the year due to the unexpected extension of the federal solar Investment Tax Credit in late 2015. Changes to the Feed-in-Tariff structure in China caused a global oversupply environment, which further depressed pricing. Challenges aside, we expect that the solar industry’s track record of technical innovation and cost reduction will drive long-term demand dynamics. We know from other industries that companies win in transition. Our answer this past year was to strategically position ourselves, to innovate relentlessly and focus on our customers – all while reducing our breakeven point. Already at the start of 2017, we’re continuing in a direction to prove the benefits of our differentiated, industry-leading technology with the ability to deploy it across a diversified portfolio of markets, channels and applications. This will allow us to profitably capitalize on the world’s increasing demand for solar power. Leading the Market in Efficiency At our core, we are a technology company with more than 750 industry patents. For decades, we’ve been a world leader in conversion efficiency, or converting sunlight into energy. Utilizing our advantage in cell and panel technology, we’re helping to usher in a new era of solar generation. Our long-term investments in Research and Development (R&D) are paying off as our R&D and Operations teams continue to beat their own bar for cell and panel efficiency. Last year, we extended our world record for solar cell efficiency to 25.2 percent. History shows that we know how to immediately transition new technology to the manufacturing environment – as we did when we recently achieved average cell efficiency of 25 percent at our next generation Fab 4 manufacturing facility. One of the reasons customers prefer SunPower is because our proprietary interdigitated back contact (IBC) cell technology offers the industry’s highest system performance with unmatched quality and reliability. To help make sure we’re constantly innovating, we’ve made some strategic investments for the future. During 2016, we built out an impressive state-of-the-art solar cell pilot line at our Silicon Valley headquarters. Soon to be completed, this facility will allow us to test new equipment and processes, while producing new generation products at pilot scale. It represents the work of some of our greatest minds and results from hundreds of thousands of hours of innovative R&D. We’re also focusing on R&D in the field at our SunPower R&D Ranch in Davis, Calif. There, we’re testing new technologies that will help drive continued innovation in the field for our customers and the industry overall. Last year’s launch of our next generation SunPower® Oasis® for power plants, which uses drones and robots to optimize energy production, is an example of what’s to come. Streamlining Manufacturing, Containing Costs We ramped up and hit our stride at Fab 4 in the Philippines, shipping our world-leading 22 percent efficient X-Series solar panels. We also ramped up our new Performance Series (P-Series) panel manufacturing in Mexicali. Taking a long view on capacity, we acquired AUO’s portion of our Malaysia joint venture. This will allow us to more quickly upgrade our technology and maximize cost reductions. It also gives us some flexibility for future expansion as market conditions warrant. Despite these accomplishments, we decided to reduce our capacity of legacy products. We made prudent decisions to consolidate our module assembly capacity to Mexico, closing and relocating our Philippines modco facilities in order to be closer to our largest markets, the U.S. and Latin America. In 2016, we also enhanced our product offerings for a new customer base, commercializing our P-Series technology. A result from our strategic 2015 Cogenra acquisition, our P-Series panels provide slightly higher performance and much better reliability compared with conventional solar panels, but at a cost that is very competitive for those markets that are more price sensitive. A critical component of our growth strategy, we’re initially targeting P-Series panels for use at power plant installations in non-Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. This includes emerging solar markets where financing costs are typically much higher than in developed solar markets. The capital expenditures required to scale this new technology are significantly lower compared with that of our IBC products, so we can now flex our panel capacity and downstream footprint to match industry conditions with modest investment. We currently have 400 MWs of P-Series panel capacity installed in Mexico. We are seeing good early demand for our P-Series product, including a 125-MW supply contract with a major U.S. Independent Power Producer, a one-MW scale solar power plant for Tucson Electric Power and numerous Commercial projects, including 607 kWs for Methods Machine Tools’ 60,000 square foot roof in Sudbury, Mass. The cost and performance of our P-Series technology is meeting or exceeding our projections, and we are enthusiastic about the expanded sales prospects that this new technology will enable, in parallel with our established IBC products. Defining Innovation with Integrated Technology and Solutions In addition to our world leading high-efficiency modules, we lead the industry with complete solar solutions. This past year we added the SunPower Equinox™ platform, a complete residential equipment solution that combines our modules with micro-inverters, a unique mounting system, and a world-class monitoring hub. More than five years ago, we pioneered the standardized systems approach initially in our Power Plant business when we introduced the SunPower Oasis power block. Since then, we've applied the same design philosophy and planning discipline to our Commercial and Residential businesses with our launches of the SunPower® Helix™ and SunPower Equinox systems. These complete solar solution platforms reduce costs through scale and standardization, enable more efficient installation and operation, and provide enhanced customer benefit by virtue of seamless interoperability between components. We refer to this as The Power of OneTM approach. We believe that this type of standardized solution will become increasingly important to facilitate the continuing mainstream adoption of solar power. There is no better way to share The Power of One approach than to explain our work for Stanford University, where we’re delivering more than 50 percent of the campus’ energy needs using the full breadth of SunPower capability.