SEBack of Napkin
SolarEdge Technologies, Inc. SEDG
The bet you're really making is that people in Europe and America keep putting solar panels on their roofs, and keep buying SolarEdge's box that turns that sunlight into power the house can use. You're betting the mountain of unsold inverters that piled up in European warehouses, the thing that nearly killed the company, is finally gone, so what SolarEdge ships now matches what people actually install. Right now it is turning: revenue grew 20% from a year ago, and for every dollar of product it keeps 28 cents after building it, up from 11 cents, though it still loses money overall. You pay about 19 times the profit analysts pencil in for 2028, two years out with no profit before then, about the middle of what the stock cost in its normal years before the pandemic.
Key data
SEDG · price with moving averages
Source: market data.
The business
SolarEdge makes the electronics that sit between rooftop solar panels and the wall socket. Its signature product is the power optimizer, one small unit bolted behind each panel, paired with a central inverter that flips the panels' direct current into the alternating current a home or business runs on. It sells batteries too, and software on top. The customers are solar installers and the distributors who supply them, historically more in Europe than anywhere else, across homes and commercial rooftops. The edge is the installed base and the installer who already knows the platform and reaches for it again. It is real but shallow: this is hardware in a market that lives and dies on power prices and subsidy, squeezed between Enphase on one side and cheap string inverters on the other. What actually happened here is a warehouse story. After the 2022 energy panic, European distributors bought far more inverters than households installed. When buying stopped, SolarEdge was left writing off product nobody wanted, a $1.8 billion loss in 2024 and revenue cut by two thirds from the peak.
Inside the complete Back of Napkin
- 01The business
- 02The numbers
- 03Management
- 04How it fails or surprises you
- 05Closing thoughts
- 06Methodology
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