Complete Solaria, Inc. (OBAI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is T.J. Rodgers. I'm the CEO of SunPower, here with Eric Nielsen, the President of Sunder, solar company and Dan McCranie is a member of the Board of Directors of SunPower and the Executive Vice President of Marketing and Sales for our company. Sioban, you have a disclaimer. Are we ready to go?

Yes. Thank you for the introduction. A few housekeeping items before we start. Please note that today's presentation may contain projections and other forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and may cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied in our statements. As a reminder, this call is being recorded, and a replay will be available later on our website under the Investor Relations Events section. Lastly, we will hold a question-and-answer session at the end of formal remarks today. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to T.J. Rodgers, our Chairman and CEO.

Good morning. We put out a press release this morning about a merger and acquisition of Sunder Energy, a South Jordan, i.e., Salt Lake-based company with SunPower. We're going to tell you about that this morning. We already raised the money to -- for this transaction. We have investors who are under NDA that this presentation and the website will release them from their NDA. And this morning, we're going to show the exact same presentation we showed to investors to get them to fund this deal. So having said that, ready to go here. So this is an airplane that's currently the symbol of SunPower. It is a solar airplane where SunPower made the cells that went on the airplane. There are 35,000 watts of solar power there, 14 engines, 21,000 watts of power. These are obviously electric engines. We're dealing with giant propellers that are 6 feet in diameter and 8 inches across the base. The reason is this airplane set a record of 92,863 feet in the class of airplanes that take off and land under their own power. That means everything is in at every fighter plane in the United States, et cetera. And that record was set in 2001. And the interesting thing to me that represents the power literally of the sun is that record still stands. Even an SR-71 Blackbird, a Mach 3.3 spy plane that flies over Russia, flew over for decades over Russia with impunity, its maximum altitude is 86,000 feet. Since I'm an engineer and I can't help myself, I'll give you a couple of specs here. Its wingspan is a little bit bigger than 747. That's what it takes to fly that high and have enough lift to raise it. It can carry a 726-pound payload, think electronics, think low-cost, low earth satellite. And believe it or not, it can fly at 170 miles an hour because the air is so thin, it's -- its maximum is 100,000, but it's emissions were flown at 70,000 feet. I'm actually working with an engineer who owns one of these in a hangar, and he gave me this picture taken from a wing camera they put on. Here, you can see the arc of the earth. You can see the sun is clearly higher than the arc of the earth above what looks like the atmosphere. The fact is the atmosphere up here is only 0.2 psi -- sea level is 14.7 psi. So you're above 98.5% of the atmosphere here. You can see the SunPower solar cells. They were lapped to be very thin, paper thin really, so they could bend across the arc of the wing. To me, this is a great picture, and there that down over there is the logo of it. Okay. A while back, we raised money. This is last November 13. And I showed this slide to investors. We had a company that had been in financial trouble for 3 quarters, and this basically being metaled with by private equity, we were fighting back. And I told investors, we were about to acquire SunPower. And if so, our revenue will go up by a factor of 10. And this slide you're looking at raised $80 million. And now I got another one. So this is pretty much the same deal, and I'll show you the new numbers. A little background on the history of SunPower and Cypress or SunPower and T.J. That's Dick Swanson, Founder, CEO of SunPower in 1985. Me, that's the roof of Cypress Semiconductor back in 2012. That's Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay right there. We had just put unfortunately, British Petroleum panels on our roof. The SunPower panels would have been smaller and more efficient and prettier. And that was the SunPower deal technology, the best panels in the world. There was a recession at that time. That was the dot-com crash when I wrote a check. I wrote that check in 2001 to fund SunPower through the crash, and they obviously made it. Their technology was cells, silicon, that's my background. So I got what they did. We invented a machine for them that took silicon, ran it for breast and made solar cell every 3.3 seconds, including metal, contact, insulators, diffusion. So this was a full semiconductor automated process. We put the plant in Manila. So they had the best of both worlds, an automatic plant in a low-cost country. It took the Chinese 8 generations, the -- 6 generations that are now on Gen 8 to match the performance of this machine, and it took them over 2 decades to get there. SunPower was a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor. We controlled them and had 40% of the economics. When that machine turned on, the first time in 2005, SunPower did, I reported this to our investors since we had control as a subsidiary, $79 million in 2005. Tom Werner, a SunPower executive, became CEO, Dick Swanson remains CTO and the founder of the company. And together, they grew the company up to $1.5 billion. And it's a factor of 18 in 3 years, a spectacular growth, the first truly important solar company. In 2008, Cypress investors wanted SunPower Pure. They didn't want SunPower, the subsidiary of Cypress, they wanted SunPower SunPower. And after asking me for that, I pushed back for a while. I gave them what they wanted, and we spun out SunPower for $2.6 billion. One day, the stock shows up in the mail, $2.6 billion for our shareholders. The actual total price, we own 40% of the economics of the company. The total price was $6 billion. Cruise on for 2 more years, the French oil company, Total, started buying our stock out of the market. It was called a "friendly acquisition." If you call friendly the fact that they took over the company and never once had a meeting with the Chairman, me. They took over. I stuck around and helped Tom for a little while when it was clear, when I did not like the way the company is being run, I went on to my life, and I didn't see SunPower again until 2024. Tom was on the Board then, and they had a new President and the President ran them into financial trouble and they had bankruptcy. The old SunPower had bankruptcy, which they're still splashing on the new sites daily, even though it's totally erroneous. The new SunPower is doing pretty well, you'll see. Okay. Then I got Swanson back, and he's working for us now. He's got -- been a professor at Stanford. He's made a lot of money on SunPower. But when I asked him what his title ought to be, he said, "technology consultant." So that's -- that to me is epitome of Silicon Valley smart guys that don't worry too much about Prestige. Well, they do worry about Prestige, but not about little things, they worry about doing big things. He, by the way, was my -- across the hallway for me at Stanford, where I got my degree. Okay the combination of our 2 companies, Sunder is #11. And the combination of our 2 companies will be the fifth largest solar company in the U.S. This is residential, #5, and that's validated through a data service. Here's the sales of the combined companies to what we bring, what they bring. Our sales in 2025 will be about $286, theirs will be about $74. So your first thought is, okay, they're 1/4 of your size, that's what they're worth. But if you look at it, our $286 million, their sales are all -- Sunder sales are all sales, pure orders, which is as good as it gets in solar. And what that means is if I artificially divided our sales by the value of the sales and actually what we paid for the sales and then the value of installing and doing the rest of the solar thing, we did $39 million in sales and we'll do $247 million in EPC this year. So if you take this number and ask what is the downstream revenue that the engineering, procurement and construction groups will get [indiscernible], and that will go to Sunder's customers who do EPC and buy orders from Sunder and Sunder's revenue, as I said earlier, is pure orders. We think we will capture half of that by over the next year. So the revenue we're going to capture -- let me go down here first. The revenue we're going to capture is sales revenue because we will be a company selling solar cells right now of $18.5 million per quarter. This is a crude model just to illustrate the -- it's not our plan. We're working on our plan for the new company now, but this illustrates the adder that Sunder will bring to SunPower. Their revenue for EPC that will bring to us had half of their total right now. The other half, they'll still sell orders, and we won't be the EPC vendor, that will ramp up from $5 million to $20 million. So if you want to ask how much bigger will Sunder make Cypress is $40 million per quarter x4 is $160 million. Back up here, we -- the consideration pay $40 million in cash, 10 million shares. As of last Friday, it was $55 million. It's up today, pushing $60 million. I haven't done the calculation. In my case, I'm running a company I want to become a great company, and I'll show you our mission statement in a minute. Therefore, getting really good people is important to me. So I value this page every bit as much as I do the sales numbers I showed you. So Eric Nielsen, who will talk to you in a minute or 2, is Co-Founder and President, 17 years in sales. some corporate experience, MBA from Ohio State. And Eric is going to be the EVP of Sales and Marketing for the whole company. And then Max is Co-Founder, 12 years in direct sales, has been in his career solar lobbyists and a tank commander, which maybe those are related in some way. And he's got -- he's also from Utah. These guys are South Jordan, Utah, Salt Lake area. And then Devon Glassman is our first employee. He does, oh, by the way, Max is going to run a dealer division for us, which is we're going to create to contain Sunder, so Sunder can run with the efficiencies it's demonstrated. And then we're going to learn from that division and take best practices. Devon, he's had corporate finance in some big companies. He's also got a law degree and an MBA, and he's going to come in and run sales operations. If you think about it in the sales company, the guy who runs sales ops is really the operating guy because that is operations, and they do a good job at it and the focus they've been able to put on it has made a difference. They're a really good sales company. We admire the way they're run. So let me turn it over now to Eric. He's got a couple of slides to tell you what they bring.

Thank you, TJ. So Sunder has set the standard in the solar sales industry for software excellence. And this is a snapshot of some of the different pieces that we've developed. Some of these are owned by Sunder, others are custom instances that we've built out with these different companies you see here on the screen. But we plan on bringing our software excellence in for the benefit of the global company. Enzy is our integrated sales management tool. This is everything from onboarding to canvassing to performance management of our sales force. We have a lot of 1099s in the sales force, and we are expert at managing those 1099s. We do it here from Utah with 20 W-2 employees. So billions of dollars in sales over the last 6 years with only 20 W-2 employees. Enerflo allows us to design custom proposals throughout the country in a uniform way so that the sales reps can understand it simply and customers have a good experience. Merdeka is our CRM. That one is owned in-house. We connect to a CSM team that's constantly managing the pipeline, which has resulted in us having higher-than-average installation pull-through rates, which is important in this game. And then CaptivateIQ has been an incredible addition to our program, solving very complex commissions issues for us. When you use dozens of different EPC partners throughout the country, it's imperative that you have really good commission software and a good team behind it, and we have both of those things.

One -- 2 weeks after I took over SunPower to try to get it out of bankruptcy and turn it into a company, I was at our sales conference in Scottsdale, Arizona and 2 guys jumped me in the hallway and asked how come they hadn't been paid. Well, they turned out they hadn't been paid because there's an error in the calculation for commission. And whenever finance people see an error, they shut down until it gets fixed. So this is a big deal. They -- between the 2 of us, we'll have 1,700 salespeople, and this software makes it perfect the first time quickly, all of which manage the sales force. Okay. Eric?

Yes. So as you can see here, we have the SunPower map on the left and then the SunPower Plus Thunder map on the right. And there is some overlap, but I want to emphasize that the lion's share of our sales volume and installation volume takes place in the 3 dark bolded states, which are California, Texas and Florida. And so when we looked at the map together, yes, we did have some overlap, but I'd argue that more than 3/4 of our volume is in places that SunPower has not traditionally been very strong. And so this marriage is a good one in that we're filling in each other's gaps, and we're heavy in the TPO markets, which is third-party-owned systems, those systems are favored heavily in the one big beautiful bill. So we're excited to bring that strength to the SunPower family.

And from my perspective, this map that I inherited was the Blue Raven acquisition done several years ago by SunPower and then a little bit of Complete Solar (sic) [ Complete Solaria ], the company that acquired SunPower assets. And we have states when we want to grow, and it's kind of like we sell more in more areas. If you're a sales company, which these guys are, the revenue comes from sales, then you want to be in as many states as you can be in. You want to hold as many 1099 salespeople as you can. So that's what it looks like when you're sales focused, and that is a big step forward for us. You can't -- well, you can see it from the map, Obviously, we're going to be different. What do we get? Dan McCranie, our VP of Marketing and Sales, tell us about that, please?

Sure. Thanks, T.J., and welcome, everybody. This kind of delineates the human assets, the capabilities and the competencies of Sunder as it's going to be acquired by SunPower. We've already talked about the large sales force, and Eric talked about the high distribution of that sales force in the 3 critical states of California, Florida and Texas. I just wanted to add that Eric brings over -- or Sunder brings over 500 salespeople in those 3 states. They are powerful states, particularly for the TPO operation, and it gives us almost a tenfold improvement in number of field sales and dealers in those states. Eric runs an efficient operation, $4 million of revenue per employee. And as we pointed out, he's up in 45 states. In order to motivate, train, manage and instill strong experience in his dealers, Eric has set up a large marketing operation as well as a good finance operation. He does a lot of battery install in his major states as a result of that, if you see the high ASP part of the curve, the industry and SunPower is around $35,000 per install. Eric is over $40,000 per install. His yields because of his software, because of his experience is much higher than the industry average. He runs from order to install. The cumulative yield from the time you receive an order from the resident to full installation is 55%. That's a good 10 points better than the industry at SunPower. Battery attach rate, as I mentioned, is 50%. Industry is at 30%. In the 3 states, in particular, Eric's battery attach is much larger. And then finally, as you probably know, the industry is kind of mutating and changing from a loan type of arrangement with the residents to a third-party owned, which is TPO. Eric got ahead of that curve. And as of right now, about 93% of his sales are TPO-based, which actually puts him in the lead with all the major houses.

I want to point out that there are 2 grand categories of funding. One is loan/cash. And that is the one that's ending with the end of the ITC tax break. The other one is when a corporation, a financial corporation, third party owns the system, their pitch is -- our pitch is using their financing. We'll put it on your roof for free. You want to have a penny out of your pocket, then we'll guarantee you that your utility bill, which we will give you, and that's our source of income. Our utility bill will be lower than your utility bill was going forward. That, based on popularity, swept the industry and these guys are there with TPO and it takes 2 forms, a power purchase agreement, buying kilowatt hours cheaper than utility or lease, which is the same economics, but you're not actually selling kilowatt hours, which in some states causes you to be called a utility, which is not something you want to be called in any state. Okay so this is -- we'll get -- they'll get slide. The organization, this right here is the current SunPower. We have new homes selling to builders to build new homes with solar on them to begin with. The old Blue Raven and they sell direct to existing homeowners, so this retrofit solar cell, and we're creating a new division for Sunder. f Sunder goes into it. We have some dealers that are in that group. They're going to move in. So we're going to run that new division. That's the one that's going to be run by Max Britton. So let me talk about efficiency of the organization. This is the slide I look at every day. I look at twice a week. The big red letters are the efficiency of people efficiency, $333,000 of revenue per person per quarter. And that number has to be $300, I believe, to have a healthy company. Okay you can see here that we're about 841. This was actually -- this thing was done Friday a week ago. So that we're at 841. We're actually below 820 right now. And we have 2 divisions, Blue Raven retrofit solar running at $251,000 per employee per year and New Homes running at $785,000. So this is our most profitable division. We then keep track of overhead. So for example, we have 12 finance people. McKinsey says we'll be at the 50th percentile -- excuse me, 75th percentile if we have as many as 22. And on each one, you can see the allowed line that we get statistically for high-performing companies were at -- were below, except for quality, where I believe quality in the solar industry will make and break people in the long term, so I fund that one fully. Okay so that's the lay of the land. I look at it every day, and we talk about whether or not we can afford to do this or that. This is the new -- and this, by the way, gives us our $333 per quarter. This is the new picture. Sunder comes in as the third division. With regard to direct employees, they have 20. Therefore, their revenue per employee is $4.01 million. And if you now take the average of those 3 groups, Cypress -- SunPower goes up to $420,000 per employee because of that, up from $333 in the last slide. So the whole company will be more efficient and do better in the tighter market we're headed to. I put here our mission statement. We have a simple mission statement. This is a mission statement done in the style of Collins and Porras, the book called Built to Last, which I worked with them, the Stanford Profs. We want consistently profitable growth from current level of $300 million to $1 billion. So it's easy enough to remember, we want to be a $1 billion company. And then the question is, is it achievable by 2028? So if you look at the quarter we're in as we speak, our Street estimates are $70 million for revenue, $3 million for profit. That's fully loaded operating income, not EBITDA. $83 million shares. If you take revenue per share, it's $3.61. If you look at our share price before this event, it was $1.55. So our price-to-sales ratio, the valuation of all the shares of the corporation or market cap divided by annual revenue for the corporation is $0.43, which is horrible. So our plan going forward is we only have to grow from $70 million to $250 million. SunPower -- their last reported quarter, old SunPower is $356 million. So that this is not going beyond where the company has been before. I put more shares in for more acquisitions to grow inorganically. The revenue per share will double. And then I put in a price-to-sales ratio of 1.6, which is currently achieved in bad times by Sunrun. And with that, you calculate a share price of $11.42. And if you get a price-to-sales ratio of only 1, which is obviously very doable, we're also looking to gain there. So we think we still offer venture capital returns to our shareholders. And our vision, SunPower will again be recognized as the #1 solar company as it was for decades. We're going to regain that by introducing advanced technology hardware. I'll talk about it in a minute, and software controlled solar system products. The hardware in the form of panels no longer is a place where you can shine. The Chinese have done a great job on that. As a matter of fact, they can sell us all the cheap panels they want, and we'll make a lot of money on them. Okay the name SunPower itself is worth money. This is a slide showing the brand value of SunPower. It comes from the company EnergySage, which quotes tens of thousands of single home deals in the residential market, our market. They have a lot of subscribers like us, but they don't name them here. They talk about the group of companies that uses, for example, REC panels and Tesla batteries or the company that uses SilFab panels and SolarEdge -- excuse me, not Tesla batteries, but Tesla inverters and SolarEdge inverters. Okay there are 3 companies that establish the low-cost option. This axis is percent above -- this group of companies is above the low percent. This establishes the low percent. 6 of the companies in the -- 6 of the groups of companies get 20% to 30% premiums for various reasons. And SunPower stands out alone with 50% premium. Now this is not that old. This is August 5, 2024. This is just before they went bankrupt. And actually, last report, including these products. Okay so they were humping along with premium, meaning we will be able to get premium prices being and living up to the promise of SunPower that I just showed you the mission statement for. They were already cutting corners at that time. They were using panels that weren't the best panels in the world, and they were using inverters of their own make that had bugs. So they weren't the SunPower best technology company in the world at that time, but their decades-long reputation was keeping them in good shape. We have redone the panel deal, and we -- our partner is REC. We will sign within a week a joint development agreement with REC. We specified a panel that we want. Everybody will get it eventually, but we'll get it first, and we'll know what it is, and we'll know how to prepare a product for it to put it on the roof first. So that's one thing we're doing. That's the hardware side of it. On the inverter side, our partner, Enphase, Enphase is, as you know, an inverter company, microinverter, 1 inverter per panel. But Enphase, as the lot of people don't know, is truly a systems company. I'm on their board. They make solar systems that do stuff for you that talk to the common man. They don't say, buy my inverter because I have less clipping than the other guys or buy my inverter because I'm more efficient. They could say that because they are 97% efficient. They don't even need a cooling -- any cooling fence on their inverter, which means they can make it lower in cost and they only use 2 copper wires per wire instead of 3. So there's a lot of nerdy engineering stuff that I can brag about all day long. But what they say is, take out your phone, download our app, push a button, see a picture of your house, see the panels on your house and see the watt hours put out by each panel at that day from the time of sunrise till that day, see if you have a weak panel, et cetera. And so that's a visual display. It also tells you every 15 minutes where power is flowing from the grid to your battery, from the battery to your house, from the solar system to your house, from the solar system to your battery, and it manages that for you. And then the second level applications, the one I like best because it's intuitive, they also install electric car chargers that are universal in Tesla and other electric cars. And you can push a button and tell it, charge my electric car only with solar electrons. So if you're super green in your philosophy, then you can say my car runs on electricity, not a drop of gasoline and the power that went to my car was not made with any natural gas or any generator that uses petroleum products. That's what the new SunPower is going to look like, and I'm working on that now. I am an R&D guy. So I get the basics of the business done, and this is where I plan to spend my time. Saving money, we're profitable. I'm going to brag about profitability. But the way I achieved it, if you drive through Williamsburg, Kentucky, which I do occasionally on my way to my Bourbon company in Lexington, Kentucky, you see this giant thing. It's a 500-foot long boat made with 6-inch thick. You can see the beams on it. And the locals there they're big in the bible, and this thing is built to the bible specs for the Ark. Okay? So the Ark is where the animals went before the rain hit. I said, okay, we'll do that. So I defined the Ark to have 1,225 seats, which is a calculated business number. We started out with SunPower with 3,499 people. And I calculated we could hold and keep pay well, give stock to 1,200 people. So over time, as we've leaned down the company, we've lowered that number. So there's the 820 number there. We've come down. This -- these are the 3 quarters that we've been in business. So there's 3 quarters right there. I wrote now we're 841. This is for investors. Actually, during the time of -- since I wrote this slide, we're now down at 820, and I have a new deal with the employees. I won't bug you anymore about reducing headcount. You do need to swap headcount. You need to bring in every good person you can find and find a way to fund it with -- keep -- still keeping at 820. That's the way we run the company to be lean, but also have good people. This is sort of the bottom line. This is a graph of operating income, and I put in there as a footnote revenue. And the graph starts with the SunPower acquisition, the SunPower asset acquisition. You're here right now, we're announcing this acquisition here. It goes back 1 quarter before the SunPower acquisition, where the old company lost $39.6 million. In the first quarter, we were running it. We cut that to $5.9 million. We stabilized the revenue at about $80 million a quarter. The next quarter, we made our first profit. So it took us 180 days to make a profit, and we knew we could make a profit on $82 million, and I bragged about the fact that I could get hammered and still make profit. And right after I said that, I got hammered. And this was $67 million. This was when the leak of the ITC came out, and we still made profit. As a matter of fact, that would have been record profit if that hadn't been a low revenue quarter. So this quarter, I told you our Street numbers are 70 and 3. These are the latest numbers. We're still at 70% and a pinch more than 3. That will be record profit for the 3 quarters we've been around. This is the new data. This is never before disclosed. So this is nonpublic information, MNPI. And this is sort of the data point here that we showed investors to get in to fund the new company after reminding them as I have you, how it came about. So in this quarter, we're going to have record profit and record revenue. And the real merger, we're only going to get -- this will be the first quarter of the real merger right here. So point is this presentation is now on the website. I've now presented it to you. It's no longer public. We filed with the SEC. This is how we raised our money. This was our promise to investors to raise money. And now the -- as of 2:00 -- as of today, the investors are released to trade the stock. So they're only out of action for like 3 or 4 days. My last slide is a cool engineering slide. This is an airplane, it kind of looks like a fighter plane. I wonder what the hell they're going to do with that. It can fly at 90,000 feet. In this case, at 80,000 feet, I only have that number for the SR-71. The boiling point of water is 50 degrees Fahrenheit, not 98.6. That means your body temperature can boil water. It means your body temperature can boil away your blood. It means you need to be in a space suit. And so here's a guy find it 80,000 feet, stick and rudder, powered by the sun. That's my favorite of all the cool slides. Okay. We're open for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today is from Derek Soderberg from Cantor Fitzgerald.

T.J., Dan, congrats on the transaction. I've got a handful of questions here. Eric, congrats as well. I wanted to start with you. Regarding the higher ASP Sunder has versus SunPower, I assume that big difference is the battery attach rate. Is that the case? And then what are the plans to maybe grow that battery attach rate at SunPower as well?

Yes, you're exactly right. We have a higher average system price because of the battery attach rate. We've already been in touch with the sales force that currently exists at SunPower, and we plan on implementing our training and our strategy, our go-to-market strategy with those sales reps as well. Sometimes it just takes a group that's been doing it for a while to teach the other group how to do it, and we're confident we can get that done.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just sticking with you, Eric. Just curious what operating expenses were for Sunder, kind of taking out sales commissions. What's maybe the run rate for payrolls for the 20 employees, things like that, if there's any -- any help you can give me on that, that would be nice.

Yes. So if you exclude onetime legal expenses for an arbitration that we've completed, we're around $0.5 million a month in overhead.

Got it. Okay. That's helpful. And then I guess maybe one last one specific to Sunder. Just the sales approach, it sounds like it's kind of more traditional door-to-door. Is there anything else you guys are doing with the software technology that maybe helps generate sales? Or is it more just kind of traditional door-to-door sales approach?

No, there is more. So our group collectively has been working together for about a decade, at least the main players. So a lot of our business actually comes through our referral networks now that we've had many, many installations across the country. So we're heavy on referrals. We have done some lead generation. SunPower has a pretty robust digital marketing team with lead generation. So we're excited to participate in that. And then the industry has sort of evolved to be heavy setter closer. So yes, it is door knocking, but a lot of our closers don't actually knock doors. They just follow up on leads that are generated from more of the new hires that come into the industry. So those are kind of the main focuses. But you're exactly right, a lot of our business is done through cold calling, which is nice because we don't have to pay anyone until they've actually generated an account, which has added to our efficiency as a business.

Got it. That's super helpful. And so T.J., you kind of ended the presentation here talking about the SunPower brand, how to really effectively capture the premium on that brand. It feels like you guys have a lot of things lined up now with the sales team, software, nationwide sales coverage and partnerships so far on the panel side and the inverter side. What else should we expect on the business development side or partnership development for the remainder of the year? What's sort of on your task list before we kind of get a full hardware platform offering or maybe we're there yet already?

The first product, the first software-defined product is being readied right now. That will be soon. It will be in the fourth quarter. Our joint development agreement with REC which is about a special panel they're going to make to our spec, very high wattage panel. That signing will be this quarter. I've had a long-term relationship with Enphase. I joined Enphase when their venture capitalists were scared it was going to go out of business in 2016. So I joined Enphase in 2017, and I've been on their board since then. So I'm aware of all of their products, the software-based products, which is really what matters that what people don't get about solar is that, that little inverter set is the CPU. And if you hook a Hewlett-Packard inverter to a General Motors panel to this to that, you get a mismatch that can't do systems work because the parts can't talk to each other. So Enphase makes all the parts required, including the battery for the system, one little factoid. The inverter looks like a VHS tape. There's one plug, water type plug on one side where the DC goes in, let's say, 400 watts, 10 amps, 40 volts. Then there's another plug in the other side that goes directly to the grid. It's connected with wire directly to the telephone pole in your house. And that's where your 240-volt AC goes out. What people don't know is that because that is a completely digital inverter with computers running it. There's 2 computers inside, RMM0 and RMM4, completely digital laws of electrical engineering say, "Oh, by the way, you can put in the different program and run it backwards and put AC in this -- AC here and 40-volt DC charging comes out of here." So their batteries are actually inverters run backwards. Therefore, they all talk to each other. They all have the same communications protocol. And now they've got the plug for electric cars. So systems in the future, the people that are still in the little time put it together phase for systems, install it and if it works, you're done, are going to be competing against a true systems company. Just one example, time shifting, everybody can do, but time shifting has to know real time when the price goes up for electricity in the afternoon. So you grab electricity all day long on your battery when it's cheap. And then at night, when it goes up to like 3x or 4x the normal rate, you run off your battery and you do that every day. And that rate changes. So you have to have a solar system that's not hardwired in to do some one function. You have to have a solar system that is connected to the power grid and understands what the price of power is to negotiate or to react to the power on the system. That kind of thing, the virtual power plant is what's going to happen in the next few years, and you have to have an all-digital system to do that. So that's the Enphase side. And then on the acquisition side, Sunder took a while to negotiate with. Let me just say it that way. We started on March 15, I was down -- I go to Mexico on my birthday every year and somebody said, Sunder said they're willing to talk. So I call up their President, that's Eric and said, "[ why it's ] come on down. I take one vacation a year it's not in Puerto Vallarta. So we got to know each other, and we've been working for half a year to get the deal. I think this deal and using the internal acquisition as a reference, meaning, call them up. If you're worried about A, B and C, call them up and ask them and do it in a private phone call where I'm not around. That will allow us to do more acquisitions and grow. And right now, there's a cloud, the blackest cloud I've ever seen in the solar industry. And I'm really full of hope because we're getting rid of the government. We're getting rid of ITC. Now that sounds like a loss. It's not a loss. Companies do a lot of really stupid things in order to get that tax break. They lose their business minds and just are charging after these subsidies. That's my fact, Russell is right there. So [indiscernible]. So I'm looking forward to selling systems in a free market and let the other guys who never bothered -- and by the way, the software for the inverter -- there's Hawaii software, California software, Massachusetts software. There's going to be software to add new feature A, new software to add feature B. And unless you can download software into your solar system and change its functionality, you're going to be on the wrong side of the future, the automatic system future of solar energy and energy in general. Long answer, sorry.

No, no, I appreciate the detail, T.J. One last one for me. Just looking at the fourth quarter this year, what assumptions, I guess, did you make on the cost side in order to get to that $3.7 million operating income? Are there additional cost cuts implied in that? T.J. had felt like with the presentation, you're pretty close to where you want to be. But just wondering if there are any additional kind of cost cuts that were implied in that. I won't say guidance, but more kind of a goal.

Okay. No, you can call this guidance. You can hold me accountable. Cost cutting. Well, let me take back one more slide. When I wrote this, we were 841 people and the goal was to get to 820. We were at 816 last Friday. So I promised the troops no more cost cutting. So we're not -- on the human side, we're not going to cut costs. We always cut costs, best we can get the -- best components we can get stuff like that. But right now, we've got our team. We're ready to rock and roll, no more cost cutting required. And we got -- we were there -- we will be there on the first day of the Q4. So we're ready to roll and we're starting to strategize how to make a quarter as opposed to worrying about how much do we have to lose in cost, no more cost cutting on people.

Our next question comes from Gus Richard from Northland Capital Markets. He sent his question in writing. Similar to the last question, he takes a little further. He asks, going forward, you've spoken about ramping installation capacity through 2026 in new territories. How do you plan to maintain OpEx control throughout that process?

It will be with 820 people, that's my control, and we will add to that. You get to add for getting bigger if you're in a manufacturing area. We currently have 130 installers, and we're going to ramp up to -- we've been as high as 166. We're going to ramp back to that, maybe a little bit more, 170, and that's the cost adder we're going to have. But that adder is way, way below the added revenue. And our installation cost is pretty low because we do it ourselves, and we have good management of it. So we're adding incremental people in states that install solar. So very, very low cost. Gross margin will go up, not down.

Thank you. Another question from the web. You've spoken previously about your additional acquisitions on the new home side. What is your appetite at this point for those additional acquisitions? And when might we look for that next?

Okay. Well, first of all, there's a process in the company, what a surprise. And it's a running track of 6 companies we'd like to own. And we'd like to convince it's in their interest to come and be part of our company because our company is going to be special and different. Right now, we've got a big acquisition, although I don't see this as being a traumatic -- a lot of times, culture versus culture causes traumatic acquisitions. For example, when SunPower acquired Blue Raven, there was a culture clash between the companies. And it was still today, like when I inherited SunPower, I inherited 2 different companies, 2 different buildings, and they didn't like each other very much. And I taught them how to dislike me instead of each other. So that's a major step forward. So we're going to -- we're recruiting as we speak. I have vineyards here in California. And every year, we have a harvest party. And I can tell you stupid, T.J. actually got in a push-up contest. This is after Margaritas, a push-up contest with the President of one of the acquisition companies. And I'm 77, and he's not. He's way younger than me. I won't tell you how it worked out, but I was smiling at the end. So yes, we're working on recruiting people all the time.

Thank you. Our last question today is, T.J., you mentioned that quality will make or break the solar industry. How will SunPower distinguish itself from its competitors from a quality perspective?

Well, it started out with an opportunity I got a woman from New Jersey wrote me a letter and she said, "I have a SunPower system, I paid $77,000. It's a premium system, $77,000 for it." And as we speak right now, it doesn't produce any power at all. But I still have to pay -- she had a loan. So she still had to pay her loan payment. And she said, "I know you're not responsible for it because I left the things that kill SunPower." That's one story, you multiply that story times dozens, and that's what kills SunPower. I decided to fix it. It turns out, I didn't know it, but she was being watched by some big New York TV stations. So I read my e-mail, and so I asked our VP of Quality to make it happen, which she did. And she was gushing, you came in, you did stuff, you didn't have to do. Yada, yada, was really great. So we have that letter. Second story, a relative of Joe Namus was -- got her solar from us. She was unhappy. And she was very unhappy, sometimes in a way that was pretty ugly for us. So I sent our 2 top guys out there and I said, make it work, and we did. And she sent me a copy of -- I won't tell you what I got because it would give away the name. But I got a nice souvenir, let me put it that way. So we do that all the time. I'm involved with that all the time. I told you my quality guy is full staffing and none of the other groups do. And that's because their job is to teach the company how to be customer-friendly and how to have quality. And I have 4 meetings a week at SunPower. And I spend probably half my time talking about quality, quality initiatives. So it's semiconductors. The last day I was at Cypress, I was thinking about, T.J., I've been here 34 years, what are you going to walk out here with? And I got my daily report. The day before that, Cypress Semiconductor shipped 4.1 million units and the average outgoing quality level is 1.6 defects per million. One of the things that turned around Enphase is we brought in a good quality effort. And they now ship the most defect-free inverters in the world. They're sort of semiconductor thinking about what's a defect, not solar thinking about what's a defect. So we're just doing business as usual for semiconductor guys, and I've got enough of them, say, 10 that, that culture is still in our company, and it will make a difference. It is already making a difference.

Thank you. We have no further questions in the queue. So this now concludes our Q&A session. I'll turn the call back over to Dr. Rogers for any closing remarks.

Dr. Rogers, Okay, been called a lot of things, but not doctor. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for hearing our message. I'd like to thank our investors who are now free of MNPI for again supporting us that there's a huge overlap like more than half of the investors that supported this acquisition supported the SunPower acquisition. So I'd like to thank that group of financial people for helping us and tell you to wait for that forecast I made for the fourth quarter because we're going to do that and then we're going to move from there.