SolarEdge Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:SEDG) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator: We’ll take our next question from Jeff Osborne of TD Cowen.

Jeff Osborne: Great. Good evening. Two quick questions on my side. Ronen, what demand levels were assumed when you talked about a normalization of revenue at 600 million to 700 million? Is that sort of flat with current levels? That was part one of the question. And part two is just as the industry normalizes whenever that is next summer, why wouldn’t there be a knife fight in terms of pricing? I know you said there was a sort of stable outlook in the quarter and in the near term, and payment terms were more important to distributors. But it looks like it’s a tech industry with no excess capacity. Obviously, you’re rationalizing capacity. I’m not sure others will. But why wouldn’t pricing go down meaningfully in the second half of the year?

Ronen Faier: Okay. So first of all, I’ll start by saying that yes, as you mentioned, the way that we modeled the normalized level is taking the point of sale data for the last three months as it is, and therefore yes, if there’s going to be recovery in this, then we can see a higher number. I would say that we do take in our numbers also an assumption about changes in pricing. As you have mentioned, right now, we did not change our prices within Q3. And I’m not sure that we will do anything on the inverter side at least in Q4, given the fact that we believe that with inventory levels that you see right now, there is almost zero impact on changing pricing. First of all, because nobody is taking orders. So if they’re taking very little orders, no reason to change your pricing, because everyone is selling the inventory that they have, plus we do not see that it can actually change the behavior along the elasticity of demand curves.

So I must say that moving forward, we do assume that prices will have to be adjusted in some places. It is going to be very much related to the offering that we see. For example, the more markets are moving to dynamic rates, these are going actually to products that are a little bit maybe more expensive, because of the fact that they’re allowing better capabilities. We do believe that maybe in batteries, we will have to adjust down prices. Because when we look at the competition today, yes, our prices I would say are not the cheapest that you see in the market. And I can tell you that in our stabilization number, there is a baked in assumption on possible price adjustment that we will need or may need to implement. The reason that we put in there, even if we’re not sure if we’ll have to take them, is as I mentioned in my answer to Brian, after this unprecedented event that we’re missing a quarter never happened this company history, we wanted also to be very cautious in the way that we’re modeling.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Jonathan Kees of Daiwa Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Jonathan Kees: Great. Thanks for taking my questions and squeezing me in here. I’ll keep mine quick in the interest of time. So I wanted to ask regarding the call up in Israel. You talked about it’s about 11% of your staff there and 6% worldwide. That seems kind of to me somewhat significant, maybe not material, but significant. I wanted to ask, is that the call up more cross the board or especially in Israel? Is that more like with your business folks, you professionals, your engineers, obviously under 40 and [indiscernible] or is it across the board in terms of just occupational and the professional level? I’ll leave it with that. And I’ll take the rest of my questions offline. Thanks.

Zvi Lando: So a quick correction, it’s male and female. So it’s not — it’s even in that regard. Our manufacturing and business activities are mostly operated outside of Israel and not dependent on anything significant in Israel, not the infrastructure and not people and that’s why this does not have any impact on our execution towards our customers. From an R&D perspective, there is an impact as I mentioned. The call up is quite evenly distributed across the different departments and that gives us the ability to reallocate and move around people to make sure that the main projects are staffed with critical mass to move them forward. And it’s actually aligned with the business discussion that we’re having over here that this type of business environment is the right one to focus and to identify what are the real key drivers of the business and input the right quantity and quality of people on them.

So that’s what we’re doing for both reasons. So I think it’s in that regard what is important to execute in the business we are able to support without interruption.

Operator: Our final question comes from Andrew Percoco of Morgan Stanley.

Andrew Percoco: Great. Thanks so much for taking the question here. I just want to discuss some of these backlog cancellations, and apologies if you had answered this, but can you maybe just walk through your decision making process on why you decided to accommodate those requests? And I think it’s how do we gain comfort that this is truly a one-off in nature? And I guess is there anything that you got in return maybe concessions on payment terms for future orders or just to make it maybe a little bit more mutually beneficial in the long run? Thank you.

Zvi Lando: Yes, I’ll keep it short. But we’ve been operating in Europe since 2010. We grew our position and market share in multiple countries through building long-term relationships and delivering quality products and services. And we’ve done this with a network of partners, both distribution partners and installation partners across all of these countries. And we intend to continue and do that with them for years to come. So that is — at the core of our decision process and consideration is that this is a long-term huge market. These are quality players that we’ve been working with. And we will continue to do so. And fluctuations and ups and downs and helping each other out during critical times and not sticking to the letter of the law to force them to take inventory that they don’t need and put them in a financial hazard. We thought that’s not the right thing to do as part of our long-term view of the future of the market and where we are within that market.

Operator: And this does conclude today’s question-and-answer session as well as our call for this afternoon. You may now disconnect your lines and everyone, have a great day.

Zvi Lando: Thank you.

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