All right. Good morning, everyone. I think we'll get started here. My name is Brian Lee. I head up the Clean Tech research team here at Goldman, for those of you that I haven't had the chance to meet. Thank you for joining us for this morning session. We have to my left, CFO of SolarEdge, Ronen Faier. I'm sure many of you know Ronen. He's been a mainstay at this conference for the past few years. I think actually right around this time, first day of the conference last year, he was one of the first speakers, and had some interesting comments that I think a lot of people took away from, last year's event, around the market. So, you know, with that as an introduction, I wanted to maybe just start right there. You know, Ronen, you've got one of the more dynamic, diversified portfolios across the space. You've got U.S., Europe, resi, commercial. Given it's a new year, maybe we can go around the horn a little bit and- Mm-hmm ... just kinda hear your thoughts around each of the markets. I really wanted to start with the US, though, 'cause I know there's a lot of focus. Last year was tough. You were one of the first to call out that it was gonna be tough. Where are we now in the cycle? What do you think 2024 growth looks like, and are we in store for any kind of, you know, positive growth inflection in the US? Sure. So, first of all, thank you very much for having me. Always happy to be here. In general, I think that next year the view is going to be determined, whether you look at it as a whole year or quarter by quarter. I think that as a whole year, it's gonna be, we believe, lower than 2023. But I think that we've bottomed in the last two quarters. I would call it, you know, demand reduction here in the United States. So I think that quarter over quarter, you should start to see an improvement, and still it will not be able to compensate for the beginning of 2023, so year over year, you're going to see a little bit of a reduction. The reason for our belief is, I would say twofold. One is that the economics that very much deteriorated the situation for payback periods in solar are at least expected to improve. There is an expectation that interest rates will start to go down. I think that we're hearing about, you know, at least five notches of interest rates going down over 2024. I believe that we already witnessed that electricity prices start to go up, and this is something that, of course, moves the payback period to a shorter position, and this is something that's needed. The second thing, I believe, is the fact that the impacts of the IRA in California are already here, and they start to be digested by the market. So, on one hand, you see that in California, on NEM 3.0, installers, selling companies are polishing over time their selling points. I think that they start to get the reasoning behind it, and they start to get the information behind it. I think that the fact that equipment prices go down a little bit helps them in this regard. I think that in other markets, the IRA impact that maybe stalled the market because, you know, why would you install something if you know that the benefit is gonna be here for the next ten years, now it's gonna be nine years? Then you already see that a combination of the macroeconomics that are improving, plus the IRA will start to play a little bit of a better in a better way. So I think that we are all... All in all, we've bottomed. We're going to start increasing right now, but not yet to compensate for what we saw at the beginning of 2023. Maybe just to drill down on that a bit. Mm-hmm. So there's a lot of, you know, just like last year, a lot of uncertainty heading into this year. I think, you know, there's certain market pundits calling for, you know, down 20% resi growth in the U.S. Some people a bit more bullish, saying it could be flat to down a little bit. Sounds like you're saying it's still down. Do you think it's down in that kind of double-digit range when we tally up the year? And then when you talk about... You know, it's always hard to call the bottom- Mm-hmm ... but Q-on-Q improvement, is that 2Q volume trends already improving off of 1Q? But can you, can you kind of- Sure ... drill into what, timing you're looking at? So first of all, seasonality always plays a major effect in this market. You know, once winter is going away, at least when it comes to the Northeast, you start to see those markets behaving a little bit better. And still, you know, absent of California, the Northeast is still a relatively, relatively relevant market. So I don't know if I can call it the bottom. Again, this is our belief or understanding, because, you know, as long as you believe that consumers are logical, nothing. We do not believe that we see anything bad happening other than maybe, again, macroeconomics going, sliding into a bigger recession or something like this. But I think that from all the economic reasons, there is nothing that should deteriorate. And because of the fact that I believe that the interest impact will come over time, and because of the fact that I believe that electricity prices will go over time, this is why we feel comfortable to see this gradual growth. I would more expect things to improve towards the second quarter, because of seasonality, though. Fair enough. I'm gonna shift gears to Europe, which has, obviously become a big part of your mix- Sure ... over the past couple of years. Started off 2023 very strong, ended the year sort of seemingly entering a downturn later than the- Mm-hmm ... U.S. So kind of, maybe set the stage for us in terms of Europe as you look at where we are in the cycle there- Mm-hmm ... heading into the new year. And then, just like we had California and the U.S., a big kind of political/regulatory, pivot mid-year, seems like Europe has a few countries that are going through that as we speak. Right. So if you could kinda walk us through the moving pieces there? Sure. So I'll start with data, because I think that the only way to judge a region, especially a region that is so complex like Europe, because of the fact that there are many countries with different policies and sometimes different dynamics. When you look at the aggregate data, with the exception of the very last weeks of 2023, almost every week throughout the year, when we look at installation rates, these are the amount of units that are being connected to our monitoring portal. We see in general in Europe, that other than in the last few weeks, every week in 2023 was better than it was in 2022. And we did see a deterioration towards the end of the year, compared to last year. One reason was, by the way, that last year, the war with Ukraine was much more pronounced, and the fear of a lack of electricity. Of course, electricity prices were much higher, today they're lower. And therefore, we saw that all in all, Europe at the very last few weeks was lower in 2023 compared to 2022. But 2022 was a little bit of an outlier as well. So we still attribute it mostly towards the seasonal impact of winter. When you start breaking Europe into countries, then you start to see a little bit of a more interesting trend. So the first one is... I'll start with a positive, is places like Germany. Germany was expected to install this year around 12 gigawatts of solar energy, new solar energy. The desire is to go towards 20 GW annually. That's a market that's bound to grow, and we believe that it has all of the reasons to grow. First of all, electricity prices went down, but they're expected to increase over the next few weeks or months. The cost of the carbon tax is going up by about 30%. The subsidy that existed on electricity prices, subsidy that was given in the midst of the war in 2022, elapsed. There were not many subsidies in general to solar in Germany. None of them was taken away. You do not pay VAT. From all good reasons, economics are supporting in Germany continued installation. Germany today, by the way, is bigger than the U.S., at least in the relevant market for us, and this is something that we expect to continue. Will it grow 50% year-over-year like we saw in 2022 or maybe at the beginning of 2023? That's most likely not the situation, but we do expect to see a growth there. When we go to look at Austria or Switzerland, countries that are following the same dynamics, I think that again, combination of electricity prices plus VAT cuts in Austria, are expected to grow this market in 2024 compared to 2023. On the other side, there is a lot of uncertainty in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a country that used to be one of the major markets for solar. There's a new government there... Sorry, there's a new elected party that's supposed to form a government, that was not formed yet. The system there is that this party will have to form a coalition. The policy around solar is unclear there. We believe that whatever the result is going to be, the market is going to be a positive market. If the government in Netherlands is not going to support solar, most likely that you'll see the Dutch market becoming a battery market, which is a good market because you see less installations but much higher revenue. If it's going to be a government that will support solar, you will not see batteries, but you will continue to see very strong market. The problem right now, uncertainty. You don't know what system would you like to install right now. So we do see a decrease there. In between, you see a variety of countries, you know, U.K., Belgium, even Italy, by the way, where interestingly enough, the cancellation of the benefit, called the Ecobonus at the beginning of 2023, didn't change the market dramatically on a megawatt basis. You simply see less batteries in this market. Our expectation is to see a growth in Europe, a mild growth. It's not going to be a big growth in the overall Europe. We believe that you'll see colors among the various countries, but we expect to see a growth here. Commercial is big for you in Europe. Yeah. So can you kind of, delineate between what you're expecting in Europe resi versus Europe commercial? When you say mild growth overall, does that apply to both end markets? So I think that, yes, but we believe that commercial has a bigger potential of growth because of the ESG trends and also the impact. Again, if Carbon tax is increasing, of course, you know, industrial companies will need to put more solar and to offset a little bit more of their carbon footprint. So it will follow, again, to our view, the same dynamics. I think that it's going to be a little bit better than residential, though. And then the channel inventory situation, and you talked about, you know, U.S., it feels like we've been bottoming here. Mm-hmm. So, you know, outside of normal seasonality, maybe we'll get better Q-on-Q trends- Mm-hmm ... into the second quarter. Is it a similar cadence that you're expecting in Europe? And then also, can you talk about, you know, specifically what you're seeing in terms of inventory in both, both markets? So expectation is similar, but I will, I will say with all cautiousness, that this is an expectation because there is one major player in this equilibrium. This is winter, and we do not know how it is going to play out yet, at least for this year. The beginning was not very promising. You know, you saw snowstorms in Germany, in the beginning of December. This is something that we didn't experience last year, at least. Maybe there is a climate change eventually. But, in essence, we do believe that we'll see similar trends. What we do see right now, though, is that the inventory levels are decreasing on an absolute level, but also the point of sale is decreasing, either because of seasonality or because of the fact that there is a cleansing in the what we call underlying channels below. I wouldn't say that it's better or worse than what we expected. It's within the ranges of our expectations, but I think that we'll have a much better view into February, March, once we'll see, you know, the end of the winter. Okay, fair enough. Maybe just wrapping up this discussion around demand trends and the growth outlook. Battery is also a big product category- Mm-hmm. for you guys that has been seeing a lot of growth, but did slow down here in 2023- Yes. Seem to be some regulatory changes, like in California, that are supporting battery growth. So what's your general view on battery growth and demand as you head into the new year? Sure. So, so first of all, by the way, the demand in 2022, at least in the beginning, was also skewed a little bit upwards because of the fact that everyone wanted to have batteries. At that time, it was relatively hard to get batteries. So I think that, there is a big difference between purchase of batteries from us compared to the installation. When we, we review installation rates of batteries week over week, and, and we do review it weekly, we see an upward trend, by the way, both in Europe and in the United States. I do think that, you know, there is, just like in, inverters and optimizers, there is a large inventory of batteries and panels, and they need to clear out again. The phenomena that we expect to see, and again, I think that it's already supported, is first of all, the fact that, yes, you'll see more batteries and battery attachment rates, attach rates. California, of course, is a great example, and I think that you'll see much more. If you look at reports coming from Bloomberg or other companies, they do expect to see continued growth in the U.S. from about 15%-20% attach rate to about 40%, so we share the same view. In Europe, the attachment rate is already relatively high. You know, if you're 80%-90% in Germany, you cannot go much higher than this. So I think that you just need to see the overall inventory clearing out. The other thing that we do see, though, is that at least in the U.S., our own batteries sales. When we look at installations of SolarEdge equipment with batteries, a lot of our equipment is installed with Tesla, a lot of our batteries are installed with LG batteries, and a lot of our inverters are installed with SolarEdge batteries. We do see constant improvement in the ratio of our batteries installed with our systems, and this is something that I think comes from starting to understand the benefits of the DC-coupled advantages, plus the fact that, again, it's a system that was built to work together, and the easy installation and the fast commissioning is something that starts to play a very nice role in this trend. So when you think about all these moving pieces, you know, you talked about kind of, U.S. is probably still down for the year, mild growth in Europe, and then. Mm-hmm. Batteries sound like they could be growthy again in 2024. How would you kind of force rank across those three broad buckets in terms of what you see fastest growth in volume-wise? Mm-hmm. What you see slowest growth in into the new year? Again, it's hard for me to say simply because of the fact that there is an unknown of the levels of inventories that we see, at least, you know, in the sub-channels, and I don't know how much will be sold. I think that it is clear that the expectation is that 2024 will be a lower year in revenues for us compared to 2023, of course. So that's something that's easy to see based on even the stabilization levels of it, of sales that we saw in the past. I'm not sure that I can bet on which one will go faster. I would say that I would expect to see all markets at about the same improvement and at least again, happening towards the second or the later part of the year. I'm not sure that I can call one area that I see as growing much faster than the other. Okay. Wanted to, you know, touch on, pricing, margins, competition. Obviously, in this uncertain, demand backdrop- Mm-hmm. There’s some implications. Sure -for what you're doing strategically there. And you have had some margin setbacks here recently, so wanted to maybe focus on that first. You called out last quarter a path to get back to, I think, 25%-27% non-GAAP gross margins X the IRA credits- Mm-hmm. which we'll get to in a little bit. Yeah. But, you know, that's lower than the margins you've historically targeted if we look at past analyst days. Sure. Big picture question, kind of what's changed structurally? In terms of these new margin targets, there's a long path to get there. I know you haven't set out the exact timeframe, but can you talk about some of the specific pieces and maybe quantify how you build back to that 25%-27% level? Sure. So the first thing to change is, I would say, our level of cautiousness. You know, with... In the third quarter, for the first time for SolarEdge ever, in my career, you know, we, we missed a quarter. And, and, you know, when this is something that happens, you don't want to make it into a habit. So by definition, you become a little bit more, more cautious in your projections. But if you look into the drivers of gross margins, the main difference is that, first of all, you'll see more batteries in the overall mix, and batteries are carrying lower gross margins. You know, when we did the Analyst Day in 2022, the battery ratio of our sales and even expectations was lower, and this is something that, that is going to impact. Plus, the fact is that what we call the stabilized level of revenues of $600 million-$700 million, that we called the most likely for Q3, this is not the level that we expect moving forward. We do believe that, the amount of inventories and the way that the market behaves, we'll see higher growth in 2025 than in 2024. That means that we need to preserve capabilities that are in excess of what we need in 2024, and this creates a drag on our margin. You know, for years, and, and you know, it's really from the very beginning of our life as a traded company, we've been fighting air shipments for a very, very long time, and the main reason was because growth was always exceeding our ability to build capacity. Now, we have capacity. So the question is: I need much less capacity in 2024 than I needed in 2023, and by the way, most likely less than I will need in 2025. Maintaining manufacturing capacity costs money, and especially when your revenues are lower than they used to be, that's a bigger drag on your gross margin. So I think that the combination of the fact that we do have these economies of scale related to the fact that our revenues are lower, we do not want to reduce the level of our service to our customers. Service is given to our installed base. We cannot really reduce dramatically the amount of people that we're using in our call centers. By the way, we are improving processes. You'll see cost improvements across the line, by the way, in SolarEdge. But in general, you cannot cut below a certain level. You do not want to cut manufacturing capacity, and all of it is creating a kind of a toll, a kind of... I call it a call option that we pay in gross margin in order to make sure that if it is a market that's growing in 2025, I don't have to sit here next year and explain why we air ship products. I guess as a follow-up to that, is there, you know, what I'm hearing is there's a lot more fixed costs- Mm-hmm. in the business than there were historically, and then you've got the battery mix shift, which is- Mm-hmm ... dragging on margin. Yes, but on a percentage level and not on a absolute value level. Meaning, if revenues go down by 60%, you know, Q4 compared to Q2, and you manage to decrease your other fixed expenses by 40%, you understand that by definition, your gross margins are shrinking. Absolutely. And so I guess that, that was sort of the question I was trying to get to. If you think about, let's call it, you know, either decremental margins- Mm-hmm —or incremental margins, given you have this fixed cost base, which it sounds like you don't wanna cut too deep into, and you do see a path back to $600 million-$700 million- Mm-hmm of revenue quarterly by Mm-hmm You know, later this year, it sounds like Q3. Presumably, you're saying you're gonna get to 25%-27% gross margins, ex IRA- Mm-hmm At those revenue levels, but you're also still built for the company to be bigger than that. Yes. You know, let's say, heading into 25. What is, I guess, a way to think about every, I don't know, $100-$200 million of incremental revenue dropping into, is it another 100-200 basis points of gross margin, where you do have a path to get back to 30-30% plus margins- Sure Without the IRA? So I, I'm not sure that it's—there's a linear connection that I can quantify, but I would say that at around $800 million-$850 million, you should be ex-IRA above 30, 30%. And this is, again, mostly the economies of scale of what you have here. And by the way, you know, sometimes especially we look at stocks, and when we look at stocks, we sometimes look at the shorter horizon. You know, we need to remember that when we look at energy consumption trajectory, what's going to be sources of energy? I think that there is no doubt that solar will continue to grow. There is always a question: Will we be able to capitalize on this market? Will we be competitive enough? Will it be commoditized or not? But I think that in a way, and the way that we look at it, is that it's a very long-term market. In a long-term market, you need to make sure and you need to believe, as long as it's supported, and I believe that it's supported with enough evidence, that you can go to the level that you've been before simply because of the fact that solar energy will be needed much more than it is today over the next few years. So you know, we, we look at the horizon, we see that levels should not get stuck on the $650-$700, and we wanna be ready for this, even if we pay a little bit more in the short term. Okay. I wanna also ask about maybe the downside risk, right? Mm-hmm. 'Cause given all the uncertainty that we've seen over the past year, plus, you know, the market, investors do seem to be bracing for what could go wrong, right? That's correct. And so let's say you do see recovery to those higher revenue levels, $650 million-$700 million of revenue by the second half of this year. What would be a scenario where you did see the revenue improvement in the business, but you're still kind of far off of the gross margin improvement that you're- Mm-hmm -targeting here? Because I think just from talking to investors, it seems like that's the biggest debate right now as to how do you go from single digit gross margins- Mm-hmm -back to 25 in 2-3 quarters time. What could go wrong if you don't get there in that, you know, timeframe? Sure. So, not a lot, but I'll try to explain. The cost structure for next year, for me, of product is already fixed. I know it. Why? Because I have a very large inventory. A lot of our products that are going to be sold in 2024 were already manufactured or are manufactured. I know what the cost is. The only thing that can really change on the margin is basically our, I would call it, fixed cost or non-variable costs related to the sale of product. So what could they be? One, if there is a major quality issue that requires bigger investment in changing products. Given the fact that our products today are actually much more mature and, we know that we solved some of the issues that were a drag on us, before, especially related to the fact that we've changed our components in our, inverters to automotive components that are carrying lower failure rates. I think that this is something that can impact big if it happens. We believe that the combination of, again, things that we've done in our product offering that is going to not to change dramatically, is not supporting this. The second thing will be if there is a major competitive environment in Europe that really pushes prices down in a way that my cost is already given, but my prices will have to go down dramatically. I do expect that prices will have to fall in 2024. We do not believe that they will fall in, I would say, double digits. I believe that it's gonna be in the mid to maybe high single digits, and this is something that we bake into our assumptions. But sometimes, you know, the market, especially after emerging from this kind of inventory flux situation, you see a little bit of irrational behavior, and we may be dragged into it. We try not to play this game usually, but sometimes it may happen, so this can be certainly a drag. The last thing that can happen is I relate again to batteries, because it's almost the same dynamic that I've discussed about pricing, but I think that there's a huge capacity of batteries that's being put in place. I'm not sure that the demand is supporting it. The more you see that batteries are dominated by Chinese players, especially on an LFP front, you do find sometimes irrational behavior. You know, I was in the Netherlands four weeks ago. Module prices that were about $0.44/W, just at the beginning of 2023, were sold in December, sometimes if it's black on white, at $0.08-$0.09/W. This is not a sustainable number. This is a number that represents a loss, but still, you know, some of the players needed to do it because they have too much of an inventory. By the way, I'm talking about selling into the channels, not outside. The end result is that sometimes you see a little bit of irrational behavior when you see very large inventory levels, and this may happen in this market. Can we, maybe just, follow up on pricing a little bit? I know- Mm-hmm. -We get a lot of questions on pricing. You must get a million questions on pricing. So when you talk, two questions, just based on the comments you've just made. When you're talking about an expectation, it sounds like an internal expectation of, you know, mid-single to high single digit price declines in Europe. Mm-hmm. To qualify your comments. Is that being embedded into your base case outlook for these margin targets you have? Yes. Yes. Okay. And then, is that something you're already sort of experiencing, partaking in, or you're just waiting to see when you'll have to react to the rest of the market that's still to come? So the latter is the right thing. We do not volunteer to decrease prices, and right now, decreasing prices doesn't make any sense, because if you see customers stuck with, I don't know, three, four, or five months of inventory, if I reduce prices, and we hear it from customers, if I reduce prices now, I give an unfair advantage to those who doesn't have inventory of ours. So in our view, reducing prices right now doesn't make a lot of sense. Once we start to see that inventories are moving and there are dynamics, we'll decide what to do. We will not volunteer to reduce prices. We do believe that we can sell at a premium. We based on LCOE calculations that we do. We do it based on amount of energy and payment period that we do. We also, by the way, base it on the fact that, you know, when module prices go down by sometimes 75%, if the inverter prices will go down by, let's say, 10%, 15%, the impact on the overall price is very, very minimal, especially if you compare it to the benefit of having a much more sophisticated system that can deal with the dynamic tariffs and the storage schemes. And by the way, again, when you put an inverter, you need—it's like buying a TV for 12 years. It's like buying a washing machine for 12 years. You would like to make sure that you buy the best one, because you know the demands will change over the next few years. So maybe we will not even need to change it dramatically. But we take it into account because we did increase prices dramatically over the last two years. The last increase was in February last year. Some of the reasons for the price increases that were related to shipping costs and other costs went down, you cannot really justify it. So I think it's a fair assumption to make, but it doesn't at the same time represent any kind of a feeling or belief that we cannot continue to sell at premium and sell at a reasonable premium. You were clear in saying this was kind of your view on Europe. So, is there a different view on pricing in the U.S.? I know your mix is different and your competitive dynamic is different, but there's also, you know... And kudos to you, you guys are now eligible to receive the $0.11 per watt credit on- Mm-hmm Micros under the IRA legislation. So do you have more wherewithal in the U.S. to work with price? Are you seeing anything from your peer, Enphase, that might... It seems like if one of you guys flinches, the other sort of- Yeah has to react. So maybe level set us on pricing in the U.S. and the outlook there. ... So, you know, still absent of, you know, Tesla becoming a very, very strong or very, dominant, player in the market yet, it's a duopoly. And in a duopoly, it's almost like, you know, if you go to game theory, it's like kind of the prisoner dilemma, you know? In essence, we do not believe that any price moves in the U.S. will change dramatically the market share dynamics. What we usually see is that the dynamics of market share are determined by which installers use you and whether they grow share or reduce share. Sometimes it's not even related to what you've done. We believe that in the U.S., at least in the duopoly situation, de facto duopoly situation, reducing prices is going to be a race to the bottom because it will not change dramatically the results. The entrance of Tesla, if it is going to have a big, major impact, I'm not sure about it, but if it will, it may change a little bit of, of this dynamic. As long as it doesn't happen, we don't see any reason to do it. I would say, though, that what we do see in the U.S. is a different phenomenon where the kind of help that you can give customer is sometimes more important than a pricing. All of them are crunched for cash, so longer payment terms. Many of these companies are striving for other arrangements that allow them, you know, to take a little bit less risk on inventory. So I think that what we do have in the U.S., because of the fact that it's a very concentrated market, is the fact that you have a little bit more tools to play with in trying to acquire customers, other than just reducing the price. All right. I think we're running up on time here. So maybe since you did bring up Tesla, I just wanted to wrap up on that one point, 'cause it's also been a hot topic of discussion in the past year plus. You know, we've known Tesla to have a string inverter in the market for several years now. Mm-hmm. I think they officially introduced it in 2019. Yes. But the buzz around them has clearly grown. Is that industry buzz? Is that just market buzz? And what's changed, if anything, to make you, sitting on a stage like this, acknowledge their competitive threat a bit more than I would say the past few years? We just haven't heard as much from them? So I'm starting now my fourteenth year in storage, so I've seen a little bit of market buzzes around them. We remember Huawei, we remember other ones. I think that a lot of it is market buzz because of the fact that Tesla is Tesla. You cannot take, you know, the brand, aggressiveness of this company. I think you cannot take it away. If you look at it on a pure product offering, it's a where usually you see lower LCOE. With a battery, no DC-coupled, so most likely that the payback period for a non-Tesla product, at least ours, will be a little bit better. And this is something that we believe that, you know, had it been any other regular competitor, I would say we know how to deal with it. We deal with it every day in China. Tesla has this magical impact of their brand name, and I think that, yes, it's certainly among investors, because you always look for the next threat or next something that will, you know, bring a little bit of juice into trading and choosing stock. But I also think of the fact that, you know, it's an unusual player that is going into the market. I don't think that it will change dramatically the dynamics eventually. If you look at the market share of Tesla, if you go to Wood Mackenzie, it hadn't grown up so much. There is a change recently by the fact that Tesla decided to go into distribution. That's something that's relatively new. I think that the combination of batteries and inverters, plus IRA or without, give them a little bit of a different dynamic. But with all that said, it's a regular string inverter, and I hope that, you know, over time we'll be able to explain why economically we're better, and still, it's simply a different player that you see there. Fair enough. I think, we'll wrap up on that note. I I wanna thank you, Ronen, for joining us and- Thank you very much, and have a good conference in 2024. All right. Thank you, everyone. Much better than this one. Thank you.