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Back of Napkin

Nextpower Inc. NXT

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The bet you're really making is that big solar farms keep getting built, and keep buying Nextracker's motorized steel racks that tilt the panels to follow the sun. You're betting that even when Washington pulls back the tax breaks that fueled the US solar boom, the rest of the world builds enough, and Nextracker's backlog carries it through. Right now it is going well but slowing: the biggest quarter ever at $935 million, yet growth cooled to 8% from 20% a year ago, while margins hit a record. You pay about 22 times last year's earnings, near the top of the range the stock has fetched since it listed in 2023, and about half what it cost a year ago.

Key data

Price$84.50
52-week range$64.30 – $163.13
P/E (trailing / FY2029E)21.9x / 12.3x
EV/EBITDA15.5x

NXT · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$21$58$94$130$166 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Nextracker makes solar trackers: the motorized steel structures that hold utility-scale solar panels and tilt them to follow the sun across the sky, lifting a project's energy yield by roughly a quarter over panels bolted flat. It is the largest tracker maker in the world, selling to the developers and engineering firms that build large solar farms, and layering on software, called TCS, that steers the array through weather and terrain. The clever part of the model is how little it owns: Flex, its former parent, builds the hardware, so Nextracker runs at a fixed-asset turnover above 40 times and converts growth into cash without heavy plants of its own. It spun out of Flex and listed in February 2023. The moat is scale and installed base in a business where bankability, a track record lenders trust, decides who wins the next project. The thing a customer actually signs for is a steel-and-software system that will still be standing and tracking in 30 years.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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