The CEO of Israel-headquartered solar inverter producer, SolarEdge, has stepped down. He said the “full recovery” of the company requires “new energy and leadership.”
Zvi Lando had been in the post for five years and served as SolarEdge’s VP of global sales for ten years prior to that. The company’s board of directors has installed Ronen Faeier, SolarEdge’s CFO, as interim CEO whilst it searches for Lando’s full-time replacement. Lando will remain on the company’s board and advice its management team over the leadership transition.
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“The road to a full recovery of SolarEdge is still ahead of us and to drive this recovery at a fast pace requires new energy and leadership,” said Lando. “As such, I have decided to resign from my position as CEO. I am confident the focus areas we have defined and the trajectory we are on will continue the improvement trend.”
The company has had a relatively turbulent set of results over recent quarters. In Q4 2023 it posted a 76% drop in inverter shipments as demand declined steeply. This followed a roughly 20% drop in revenues over Q3 which it attributed to a “slow market environment”.
The first two quarters of 2024 saw a slight improvement in fortunes; shipments increased in Q1 to 946MW and revenues began increasing in Q2, even as shipment figures began to waiver again.
In January, the company announced plans to lay off 16% of its global workforce – around 900 people – as part of its efforts to adapt to what it called “current market conditions”.
Since late 2023, the sharpest drop in SolarEdge’s shipments and activity has been in Europe. During the company’s Q2 earnings call, Lando cited a “flat” corporate and industrial (C&I) market in Europe in particular. The company shipped 278MW of inverters to Europe in Q2 2024, compared with 3,261MW in the same period 2023.
