SunPower Q2 2026 Earnings Call: Complete Transcript

On Tuesday, SunPower (NASDAQ: SPWR ) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below. APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit to learn more.

The full earnings call is available at Summary SunPower reported a significant drop in non-GAAP revenue from $73 million to $56 million, affecting gross margin and profit, but managed to slightly improve operating income by implementing cost-cutting measures. The company is focusing on improving execution, financial processes, and maintaining strong financial discipline to create long-term shareholder value. SunPower has seen a strong increase in bookings across its business units, but the primary challenge remains converting these bookings into revenue, particularly for short-term opportunities.

Strategic efforts include the development of the Monolith panels and a partnership with REC for advanced solar technology, aiming to enhance performance and efficiency. Management acknowledged poor recent performance, emphasizing cost reductions and structural improvements to address the revenue shortfall, while expressing optimism about future bookings and revenue growth. Full Transcript Siobhan Hickey, VP of Investor Relations Hello. Welcome everyone to SunPower's second quarter earnings call.

My name is Siobhan Hickey, SunPower's VP of IR, and I would like to review a few housekeeping items before we begin. All lines have been placed on mute at this time. This call is being recorded and a replay will be made available within the Events section of the SunPower website. 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 that may cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied in our statements. In addition, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of any differences between those non-GAAP financial measures and the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are available within our press release. Lastly, we will hold a question and answer session after the end of formal remarks today.

For those watching via the webcast, you may submit a written question at any time via the submission box located on the right side of your screen. For those joining our live Q&A, please click the raise hand icon located at the bottom of your screen to enter the queue. With that, I will turn the call over to TJ Rogers, SunPower Chairman and CEO. TJ Rogers, Chairman and CEO Good morning.

My name is TJ Rogers. I'm the CEO of SunPower. We're here to report the second quarter. I have people who present various parts of this meeting so I will introduce them real time, starting with Tom Kowalczuk, who's our new CFO.

He's got a CPA and a Chicago MBA. He's had experience in public companies and he's down here Beam Suntory and he led a finance group there with 2 billion in annual revenue. So he's got the experience in public and big company. This is his first shot at being the CFO of a public company.

He's going to present the financials today. Tom Kowalczuk, Chief Financial Officer Tom, hi, good morning. Thank you, TJ. I'm very excited to join SunPower at this opportunity to be a leader at the group at this very important time.

Over the last few weeks I have been focused on getting to know the business, our operations, our finance organization, as well as meeting the talented people across the company. While I'm still early in that process, I've been encouraged by what I've seen and the team's commitment to improving execution and going forward. My priorities are pretty straightforward: maintaining strong financial discipline, improving the quality of our forecasting and financial processes, as well as allocating capital thoughtfully and ensuring we provide investors with clear, timely, and consistent financial information.

I look forward to partnering with TJ and the rest of the leadership team as we execute our strategy and work to create long-term value for shareholders. TJ Rogers, Chairman and CEO So I've asked Tom to—this is the report we issued this morning. I've asked him to go through the financials with you. There's GAAP and non-GAAP.

We focus on non-GAAP. That's how we've reported all of our quarters so far. Tom. Tom Kowalczuk, Chief Financial Officer Yes.

6. That's a direct result of our fall-through on variable COGS and revenue. 1 approximately is fixed overheads that we cut out of the business during the quarter and is expected to carry into the future. Our operating income is slightly improved, which is a combination of our fall-through because of the change in revenue as well as the improvement and cost cutting that we did during the quarter.

So net-net we're better than the previous quarter on operating income non-GAAP by about $400,000. TJ Rogers, Chairman and CEO So from my perspective we need to explain a disaster revenue quarter today, and that will be my job today. The good news, if there is any, is that we had a huge drop in revenue but maintained—didn't change—their profit. It went from bad to staying bad.

And that was because we have done structural cost cutting of 31 minus 247 million bucks. And I'll talk about future plans for structural cost cutting later as well. I took this shot at 7:17 this morning my time and the word is you didn't like it. I don't like it either.

It's not good performance. And if you look at the company, basically we're six quarters old, Tom, and we've been at a buck and a half, plus or minus a half a buck, forever, and the last two quarters have been bad, back to back. That of course is bad, and bad that we just talked about, and that's impacted our share price. So I'm going to talk about why that happened, what we're going to do about it in detail.

Next is Dan McCraney. He's a board member. He's become active working in marketing salesforce. He's a storied Silicon Valley figure.

He's been on 10 NASDAQ boards, and this includes, you know, the two halves of Motorola when they split apart, important companies. I knew him because he spent about a decade at Cypress. He's been a CEO and his forte is marketing sales. Dan.

Dan McCraney, Board Member Thanks, TJ. Okay, what you're looking at here is total bookings for the corporation from Q4 2024 through our most recent quarter, Q2 2026, measured in terms of jobs. This is all SunPower, which includes our residential work as well as our new home as well as our commercial work. So what you're seeing there is an aggregate of all three of our business units going forward.

As you can see from Q4 2025, Q1 20, Q2 2026 we've had a strong increase in bookings. This bookings increase is now nine straight months generally across the board. As a result of that, going forward into this quarter you're seeing our projections for revenue, which is largely based on how much of the bookings we're able to get through to the factory, installed, and revenued. That's going to be the challenge.

The primary challenge for Q3 is getting these bookings revenue through installation. One more point on that. You notice in Q1 2026 we were at 4,166 jobs and in Q2 2026 that number dropped to 3,655, still the third highest in the six-quarter or seven-quarter period. But I wanted to point out that the transactional short-term bookings, which is the bookings for solar, actually increased in Q2.

What dropped is our long-term new homes bookings, which we don't really see revenue for five to six to seven quarters. My point of that is for an opportunity for short-term opportunity. The sales force continues to book the short-term opportunities, residential, that allow us to have a good Q4. Finally, it takes us about eight weeks approximately to convert our jobs to revenue in residential.

So therefore the sales force right now is predominantly working on the Q4 bookings to ensure we have a robust Q4. So that's where we stand. Three strong quarterly bookings. If you talk about the transactional bookings of residential only, we've had three record bookings.

So we're talking about a lot of bad news today. But I do want to point out that what we've been talking about is good times ahead of us because of bookings, and that's still true. So I wanted to bring up that slide early. This is a picture of a headcount in the sales department.

So in this one this is our total 1099 sales organization broken out by SunPower Sunder, the acquisition we did back in September 2025; Ambia, the acquisition we did in October 2025; Purelite, which was a small acquisition we did in Q1 of 2026. We are holding our 1099 headcount reasonably at about 1,500. We've made geographic changes in that headcount. We are now moving into the higher opportunity states, especially for TPO.

That would be, of course, Texas and California, and places like Pennsylvania and Virginia. So we've redeployed our 1,500 1099s to maximize bookings, and that's what you're seeing right now. So to a first order, we're about flat with our 1099s at a very robust 1,500. But we've moved them around to areas where there's currently high opportunity for immediate bookings.

TJ Rogers, Chairman and CEO The main point here is that old SunPower. By that I mean the SunPower that went bankrupt had a large sales force, but when they went bankrupt, that sales force started to deteriorate, and we worked very hard to maintain a—actually a higher, bigger—sales force of 1099s. I thought I'd talk about myself today and show my picture. This is back when I was in high school, and I— I thought about it because I just saw a movie called Young Washington.

And it was a good movie, although the critics didn't like it because it was about an American hero. And there's a classic line in it. In 1755, George Washington got his ass kicked in Ohio by the French and Indians in the French and Indian War. And he was the head of the militia, the Virginia militia.

And he came back and talked about the problem he had. They burned his fort; they killed a lot of his people. He really lost. And he signed a—he signed a peace treaty that was written in French.

He was misled by what it said. And it was a bad contract, let me call it that. And when he was making excuses to the governor of Virginia, which was his boss, the guy was— as he was making excuses, the guy was waving his arms like this—guy's name was Dinwiddie. And he said the line of the movie I thought was great: to lead is to forfeit the right to make excuses.

So that's where I am this morning. I can [make excuses] about this or that. And this didn't happen, and that didn't happen. And then, of course, the rebuttal will be, well, great, why did you not fire the guy before he screwed stuff up?

So I want to make it clear right now: I run the company. This is my problem. So who am I? I graduated from Dartmouth in 1970.

I was second in my class. I was eight years on the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth. I went to Stanford; I got my PhD there. I'm a Moore's Law guy, silicon guy.

I worked for two chip companies—American Microsystems, where I learned how to do engineering and R&D, and Advanced Micro Devices, run by the fabled Jerry Sanders—where I won't say that I learned about sales, but I did come to appreciate the value of sales. Dan and I both worked at that company at one time. I then, for my in-effect whole career, founded a chip company, Cypress Semiconductor. We IPO'd 37 months from our funding, including building a fab.

We went public at a $770 million valuation in today's dollars. And in 2020 we sold—after I left and retired, the company sold for $10 billion. After that, I worked on the Enphase turnaround. Enphase is worth $5 billion today.

So how am I related to SunPower? I've written checks literally for $111 million. 5 million shares. So I'm looking at, like, 39% ownership if I converted my debt, which I don't want to because it's income for me.

I have no shares that I've earned because of my position getting paid with stock, and my salary is zero. So point is, making that number better is all I work for. If you think about economic motivation, obviously I want this company to succeed. I have to remind you that we're in a good time for solar.

And when you have a coat of tar over everything else, it's difficult to see through it to see the good time. This is a graph—Energy Information Agency of the United States. 6% of the houses in the United States were qualified—rich enough, right area, right ZIP code, good laws in the state—meaning 95% of the homes did not have solar that could have had solar. This number has been updated recently.

6. So there's 7, therefore 93. And there's a forecast by the same outfit, EIA, that it will be 30% in 2030. I think that's a little bit aggressive.

But the point is, even in 2030, 70% of the market will be unsatisfied and will be wanting solar. 10, raise it to the fourth power, and you've got the cost of power that people are going to have to pay going up by 50%. Meanwhile, the cost to install solar is flat to down and has been, if you look at it at a four-year rolling average, forever. What that means is solar energy is number one in addition to our portfolio of energy generation.

So here I show gigawatts. If you want to calibrate that, this is—I've added solar additions. If you want to visualize a gigawatt, think about a nuclear plant—think about that giant dome, and there's usually two of them. Each of them are worth a gigawatt.

That's a cooling tower or plant. So 70 gigawatts is a lot of power that was added—35 nuclear plants equivalent. You can see natural gas is fading. I don't necessarily agree with that, but that's what's happened.

And wind and solar are growing. Solar, you can see here on the bottom, is growing the fastest. And you really can count battery storage as part of the wind and solar phenomenon, because you have to store the energy when the wind is blowing or when the sun is out. So this is also renewable.

So bottom line, we're having a renewable transition, like it or not. Debate it. This is where the market is. And I frankly think it's right.

I think the fact that you can buy a solar panel for 100 bucks and get 500 watts of power out of it when the sun is shining is a big deal. Thing that people have talked about and they don't realize is there's two kinds of payback. Energy payback, which is ~7 years for buying and installing a solar system—and then there's the financial payback story. And then there's energy payback.

And energy is: do you ever get the energy back you get from melting glass and purifying aluminum from the panel? And the answer is the energy payback time is about a year. That is, the panel will produce more energy than it took to produce it. So the fundamentals are all there, and they're all lined up.

This is from OHM Analytics. OHM is sort of the go-to data source. I'll just make two points here: photovoltaic pricing trends—and of course they look at the pipeline—and you can see it's flat. So there is no big crash coming in solar pricing.

The reason for it is the government subsidy is gone. I was happy about that. And, as a matter of fact, there will be a short-term, slightly upward trend because of that. Second one—and this is a bad one—this is monthly residential commits.

So here we have by month going up to May of this year. This little peak back here is safe harbor. This is where everybody was buying and installing— you know, one bolt—in order to guarantee that they would get ITC credit. And then after that got done, then we went into the current new equilibrium with lower funding—30%, 30% gone.

So the reality is, if you eyeball this, 25,000 installs has gone to, let's say, 15. And this is what we're dealing with in the solar industry. We've got a significant fraction—think a third to a half—of our companies have gone out of business because there's a lower volume. At the very same time there's the lower volume and the tax credit is gone.

So the double whammy is pretty much unemploying a lot of people. Okay, so we've responded to that with $13 million in cost reductions. After Q1 '26, the first of the back-to-back bad quarters, we did a RIF. We implemented a four-day workweek.

The reason for this is we knew coming up to needing those people; therefore, laying them off and bringing them back was not proper. So we went to a four-day week to keep the people—have the least layoffs. And we also did some structured cost cutting. 1 million that Tom showed you on the first slide.

9 million, and it'll be focused mostly on management, where we have New Homes and Cobalt, and we have two sets of managers, and we will rationalize that. And that now reports to John Berg, who's going to address you later. So are we fat? And the answer is no, we're not.

We never have been. This is a graph of our headcount. When I took the thing over in Q4, I inherited 3,500 candidates to work there. We said we can only deal with a third of them.

And then we lowered this over time as we learned how to run with a leaner team. Right now we're at 700; we're targeting 700. We're at about 710. So we have a lean company.

And if you went into our place you would see people working their butts off. Last weekend—weekend before last—64 people worked overtime, which is efficient for the corporation.