SunPower Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your operator. Your conference will begin momentarily. Please continue to stand by. Once again, this is your operator. Your conference will begin momentarily. Please continue to stand by. Good afternoon. Welcome to SunPower Corporation's first quarter 2022 earnings call. This time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to turn the call over to my Mr. Mike Weinstein, Vice President of Investor Relations at SunPower Corporation. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome everyone to our first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. On the call today, we will begin with comments from Peter Ferrissey, CEO of SunPower, who will provide an update with first quarter announcements and business highlights, followed by our expectations for the remainder of 2022. Following Peter's comments, Manasiel, SunPower's CFO, will then review our financial results and guidance for the year. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available later today on the investor relations page of our website. Now, during today's call, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties that are described in the Safe Harbor slide of today's presentation. Today's press release, our 2021 10K, and our quarterly reports on Form 10Q. Please see those documents for additional information regarding those factors that may affect these forward-looking statements. Also, we will reference certain non-GAAP metrics during today's call. Please refer to the appendix of our presentation as well as today's earnings press release for the appropriate GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations. Finally, to enhance this call, we have posted a set of PowerPoint slides, which we will reference during the call in the events and presentations page of our investor relations website. In the same location, we have also posted a supplemental data sheet detailing additional historical metrics. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Peter Parise, CEO of SunPower. Peter?

Thanks, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. It was terrific to get the opportunity to meet most of you last month in person at our Analyst Day. You will recall we presented our five-pillar strategy that we are using to build SunPower into the world's best renewable energy company. Our full attention is now on the execution of that plan. Today we will highlight the results we have achieved in the first quarter toward our goals and how we plan to continue working to deliver our full year 2022 guidance. Let's discuss some of our Q1 business highlights on slide four. I'm pleased to report that customer demand continues to be very strong. And then we have added 16,500 new customers in the quarter, a 40% increase year-over-year, and nearly even sequentially with the new customer count from the seasonally strong Q4. Importantly, we also continue to see strong growth across all of our sales channels, with 83 new dealers added and 118% year-over-year growth from the SunPower Direct channels. Again this quarter, we set a new backlog record at 13,800 customers. We also set another record this quarter with over 70,000 new homes customers in the pipeline, including a growing multifamily segment. Our SunVault energy storage system continues to benefit from strong customer interest with a 24% SunPower direct bookings and tax rate. And SunPower Financial continues to make progress with a 41% bookings attach rate in the quarter on its way toward achieving our stated goal of a 45% attach rate on recognized customers by year-end. Please turn to slide number five. As we announced at Analyst Day, our discussions continue with First Solar to develop the high-efficiency, tandem thin film and polysilicon modules over the next 18 to 24 months. This product would keep SunPower in the forefront of residential solar technology as we move to diversify our supply chain and provide customers with the highest efficiency panels in the industry. Please turn to slide number six. We recently launched our dealer accelerator program to provide new growth and territorial expansion opportunities to our dealer network. Many of our dealers have the desire to grow their businesses, but are capital constrained. SunPower is the only company to address this need by making investments in our highest performing dealers. In Q1, we reached a new agreement with Empower Solar in New York City and Long Island, and we continue to see strong interest in the program across our dealer channel. This program is an important component of our plan to grow our market share over the next few years, and we look forward to providing you with further updates. Please turn to slide number seven. Our growing list of new home builder partnerships is an important part of our growth plan, and we are proud to announce our newest exclusive agreement with Lansi Homes. All homes built by Lansi in California will include a SunPower system, and buyers in Arizona, Florida, and Texas will have the option to add a system as well. Increasingly, we are seeing the home builder industry seeking to emphasize its environmental and ESG focus with a commitment to rooftop solar, and we are proud to be a partner in that effort. With LandSee, we now have national agreements for solar in states outside of California in place with five of the top 20 U.S. home builders, and we continue to work on adding more. Please turn to slide number eight. Let me share with you some of the progress we have made executing against the five pillars of our strategy. For customer experience, we have already made significant progress in Q1. Our net promoter score improved from 35 to 49, a 32% improvement year over year. Phone and chat service levels also improved, reducing customer wait times 48% to less than a minute when customers contact us by phone. We focused on these and other important measures to ensure that SunPower continues to earn the title of the best customer experience in the business. On new products, in addition to our late stage discussions with First Solar, we recently announced our expanded SunVault whole home backup offerings at 26 and 52 kilowatt hour options with an industry-leading 10-year warranty. Under growth, we now cover 71% of the U.S. geography with the addition of new dealers and additional investments to expand our business. Our mobile My SunPower app and website are both receiving new attention for rapid improvement. This has resulted in measurable progress in our customer ratings. We are just getting started here and have plans to expand the functionality and usefulness of our customer and installer-facing applications and look forward to delivering more updates throughout the year. And finally, SunPower Financial continues to grow quickly and with over 8,500 customer finance attachment bookings in Q1, an 86% increase versus last year. SubPower Financial has already added over $2 billion of third-party capital for new multi-year loans and leases this year. Before I turn it over to Manu, I'd like to comment on two of the hot topics right now, which is rising supply chain prices and concerns about panel supplies. On rising supply chain prices, I think it's important to start to remind everyone that SunPower did not raise prices for our dealers and for our customers in 2021. Therefore, we are in the unique position of being able to fully pass along our supply chain cost increases this year in 2022. When you combine these increases with the fact that consumers are seeing increases in their utility bills, it is clear that residential solar is still a great value, and the strong customer demand for our products reflects this. Regarding panel supply, panel supply has become more challenging with the recent Department of Commerce anti-circumvention investigation. It's important to note that our current main panel supplier has not been named in that investigation. But even with the challenge this brings, we've been able to place additional POs for enough panels to meet our customer demand and meet the guidance goals we laid out for you at Analyst Day. Now I'll turn the call over to Manu Seyal, CFO of SunPower, to share our detailed results for the quarter. Manu.