2/16/2021

speaker
Erica
Director of Investor Relations

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us to discuss SolarEdge's operating results for the fourth quarter and full year, December 31st, 2020, as well as the company's outlook for the first quarter of 2021. With me today are C.V. Lando, Chief Executive Officer, and Ronan Fire, Chief Financial Officer. C.V. will begin with a brief review of the results for the fourth quarter and year-end of December 31, 2020. Rounding will review the financial results for the fourth quarter and full year, followed by the company's outlook for the first quarter of 2021. We will then open the call for questions. Please note that this call will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from management's current expectations. We encourage you to review the safe harbor statements contained in our press release and the slides published today for a more complete description. All material contained in the webcast is the sole property and copyright of SolarEdge Technologies. We have all rights reserved. Please note, this presentation describes certain non-GAAP measures, including non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP net diluted earnings per share, which are not measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The non-GAAP measures are presented in this presentation as we believe they provide investors with a means of evaluating and understanding how the company's management team evaluates the company's operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as substitutes for, or superior to financial measures in prepared accordance with U.S. GAAP. Listeners who do not have a copy of the quarter-ended December 31, 2020 press release or the supplemental material may obtain a copy by visiting the investor section of the company's website. Now I will turn the call over to Susie.

speaker
Susie
Vice President of Investor Relations

Thank you, Erica.

speaker
C.V. Lando
Chief Executive Officer

Good afternoon and thank you all for joining us on our conference call. We are pleased to report that we have concluded the quarter with revenues of $358 million and the year with record revenues of $1.46 billion. Revenues for the fourth quarter in our solar business were approximately $327 million, also above last quarter's solar revenues. Our solar revenues this quarter reflect strength in the U.S. residential market, which we had anticipated in our earning call last quarter. In fact, the quarter over quarter growth in shipments from the residential segment in the U.S. was in excess of 50%. We expect this strong growth in our revenues from U.S. residential products to continue in the first quarter of 2021 as well. We have also experienced very healthy growth in our solar revenues from countries outside of the US and Europe with record quarterly revenues in Australia, where we finished 2020 with over 30% year-over-year growth. Our Europe solar revenues was down from Q3, as is the typical seasonal behavior of the European market. However, on an annual basis, we are closing the year with record solar revenue in Europe of $579 million, up from $522 million last year, led by the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Poland. We are very happy with these results, in particular, in a challenged COVID year. This quarter, we shipped over 1.36 gigawatts of AC main plate inverters, approximately 457 megawatts of which were shipped to North America. Shipments to Europe consisted of 594 megawatts. From a segmental point of view, we shipped this quarter 566 megawatts of commercial products and 798 megawatts of residential products. This split represents the strength in residential I discussed earlier and a noticeable reduction in commercial shipments in line with what we explained in our call last quarter regarding the slower recovery of commercial installations and the higher inventory of commercial products in the channel. In the fourth quarter, we believe commercial installations worldwide were still impacted by the economic slowdown. However, we did see an increase in the installation rate of our commercial products and a reduction in inventory levels this quarter, which we believe indicates that the recovery in the commercial segment is underway. Overall this quarter, we shipped 3.6 million power optimizers and approximately 166,000 inverters. As discussed in our last call, the ramp of production in our Sela One manufacturing facility in Israel continues. This, together with our manufacturing in Vietnam and Hungary, will enable us to supply approximately 85% of our U.S. products without tariffs by the end of the first quarter of 2021. On the product side, I want to spend a bit more time on our residential offering and in particular, our complete storage system. We continue to see good market acceptance and strong demand for our Energy Hub single-phase storage inverter. In the fourth quarter, we shipped to the US close to 15,000 Energy Hub inverters, up from approximately 6,500 in Q3. So far, we released the Energy Hub in power levels between 3.8 to 7.6 kilowatts. In the coming months, we will release the high power version with inverter offerings of 10 and 11.4 kilowatts. The high power versions are especially important as average installation sizes increase with consumers being more aware and interested in more power and more stored energy for backup and outage scenarios. Our energy hub supports today easy charger integration, multiple batteries for increased capacity, and multi-inverter configurations to our backup interface for increased power. In the coming months, we will add generator integration and high backup power models, allowing 7 kilowatts and 10 kilowatts of continuous power, critical for backup of a typical house load during power outages. The product is designed to handle consumption patterns that we have learned from our install base of tens of thousands of battery connected inverters. We see the energy hub as a differentiated storage system optimized for energy harvest and energy management in grid connected and backup scenarios. To complete the system, the energy hub is connected to a battery in a DC coupled configuration aim to enable harvesting of all the energy from the modules on the roof. To clarify, typically a system is oversized such that the total power of the modules on the roof or of the individual module is larger than the capacity of the inverter. As such, in an AC coupled configuration, the utilization of the energy generated from the roof will be limited by the size of the inverter. In our SolarEdge DC coupled configuration, all the energy generated by the modules will be harvested and either used to power the required house consumption or to charge the battery in parallel, thus extending backup time and increasing system utilization. The energy hub inverter can be coupled with a third party battery as we currently offer or our own battery. In that regard, we are on track with the schedule discussed last quarter of initial shipments of our own battery in Q2 and meaningful volumes in Q3. In the commercial segment, we are beginning these days shipments of the new and large synergy inverter with power rating of up to 120 kilowatts. In parallel, we began shipments of higher power commercial optimizers of up to 1100 watts for a two module configuration This in order to match the trend of high power modules that are becoming available around the world. The higher power modules and optimizers combined with a higher power inverter will reduce the cost per watt for our commercial installers and we expect will increase adoption similar to what we have seen in 2020 where our annual commercial megawatt shipments were up more than 25% compared to 2019. In addition, we are seeing growing adoption of our designer software workflow solution, which enables installers to easily design complex rooftops and seamlessly export the design for quick installation and monitoring setup after installation. On average, every month, approximately 70,000 designs are created on the platform by more than 12,000 installer accounts. Moving to our non-solar business. As announced earlier today, SolarEdge eMobility has been selected as the tier one supplier for full power trains and batteries for the Fiat eDucato. For those of you who are not familiar with this vehicle, the Fiat Ducato is recognized by many as the leading light commercial vehicle in Europe and has been produced since 1981. Recently, FCA presented the electric version of the Ducato, and we are proud that SolarEdge Immobility has been selected to supply the full powertrain and batteries for this vehicle in Europe. Our solution includes inverters, DC to DC converters, batteries, onboard chargers, vehicle control units, and software for electrical vehicles. As I have mentioned in past calls, We have already delivered prototypes for close to 100 EDUCATO vehicles that are accumulating mileage throughout Europe today. We believe the experience gained through this project, which has included adapting some of our production lines to automotive quality standards, will serve us in our solar and other businesses well beyond the already exciting news of being part of the e-mobility industry. The automotive industry plans its vehicles years before they hit the road. This nomination reflects a long-term investment and is in line with our growth plans beyond solar that we have laid out in our earning calls and that formed the basis for our acquisition. Subject to market acceptance, in 2021, we expect our e-mobility business to deliver between $100 to $120 million of revenue. In our energy storage division, COCOM's revenue grew by 25% this year. And for the first time in many years, COCOM is profitable. As a reminder, we completed the COCOM acquisition in October 2018. And this year, we have ramped the existing lithium ion cells and battery pack factory to full capacity. This quarter, we also welcomed SW Jong to our team as the general manager of COCOM. Mr. Jung is an industry veteran with more than two decades of experience in leadership positions in Samsung Electronics. We are excited to have him on board to lead our energy storage business out of Korea. This quarter, we also began construction of our Sella 2 factory in Korea. This factory, which is part of COCOM, represents another pillar of our growth strategy beyond solar, and once completed will manufacture two gigawatt hour of lithium ion cells per year. The factory spreads over 56,000 square meters just outside of Seoul, will be a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, and is expected to start production in the first half of 2022. This capacity will enable us to supply cells for our own battery storage solutions and for other applications. We ended 2020 with record revenues of $1.46 billion, slightly above those of last year. Like most, when the pandemic hit, we adjusted both our expenditure and forecast to take into account the impact of the economic slowdown. And given the circumstances, we are pleased to have completed the year with revenues slightly above those of last year. No less important, we were able to deliver these results while continuing to invest and execute on our solar and non-solar growth strategies. And with this, I hand it over to Ronen, who will review our financial results.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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