US solar installer SunPower has taken the next step in its rehabilitation with the acquisition of residential installer Sunder.
One of America’s most recognised solar brands, SunPower was rescued from bankruptcy last year following an acquisition by Complete Solaria, which eventually took on the SunPower name.
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The company has now completed the acquisition of Sunder, which it claimed would result in the US residential solar industry’s fifth-largest company in installed megawatts, based on data from Ohm Analytics. PV Tech has been unable to verify this claim.
SunPower CEO T.J. Rodgers said: “This acquisition will immediately raise our revenue to its pre-ITC [investment tax credit] levels and then on to a new record. In addition, and equally important to us, it brings to us a great sales management team with its state-of-the-art sales business processes. In short, this deal is transformational for SunPower.”
Rodgers said the new revenue would be generated by Sunder’s 893-person dealer sales force, which is managed by only 20 Sunder permanent employees who will transfer to SunPower. “Our current plan shows that this new low-overhead revenue will generate an operating income profit record for us in Q4’25,” Rogers said.
In details of the pending deal released last week, SunPower said Sunder Energy was forecasting 2025 revenue of about US$74 million on 46MW of solar sales contracts installed by its customers, who are in the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) business. Those companies in turn are expected to generate about another US$173 million in downstream EPC revenue. SunPower said it expects to capture all of the sales revenue starting at the close and then about half of the potential EPC revenue over time. This would lead to additional revenue of approximately U$18.5 million per quarter from sales starting in Q4’25 and around US$21.6 million per quarter in EPC sales, ramping up over the next 12 months, SunPower said.
The cost of the acquisition was US$40 million in cash plus 10 million shares of common stock.
Rodgers said: “The tangible benefits of the acquisition will show up in our revenue in two tranches: in sales immediately and in EPC ratably over 2026. In Q3’25 and Q4’25 we expect to have our third and fourth consecutive quarters of operating profit after four years of old-SunPower losses, and we also expect to set post-acquisition revenue and profit records in Q4’25, the first quarter after the merger.”
While the extent of SunPower’s activities since its acquisition by Complete Solaria is unclear, its Q1 and Q2 results show steadily increasing profits of US$1.3 million and US$2.4 million respectively.
Although the phasing out of the 30% investment tax credit for residential solar would suggest tough times ahead for this segment of the market, Rodgers appears bullish about its prospects.
When the One Big Beautiful Bill which led to the ITC phase-out was working through Congress, he released a statement provocatively drawing on the Martin Luther King quotation, “Free at last. Thank God Almighty we are free at last”.
Rodgers went on to add: “My direct experience is that, like tariffs, government subsidies are bad and always harm the industry they intend to help. That’s because the strings force companies to build factories where they don’t want them, to follow building codes that dramatically increase cost and slow down building schedules, to adopt wage and work rules that make the workforce expensive and inflexible, and to cause the subsidised industry to get used to living on welfare and to become unable to compete with lean un-subsidised companies.”
