Maxeon Solar provides business update, announces 15% workforce reduction

Maxeon Solar provided a business update following the end of Q3, during which the Company’s performance was impacted by reduced shipments to its largest distributed generation customer located in the U.S. and an industry-wide demand slowdown in the global DG markets. CEO Bill Mulligan commented, “our largest US DG customer breached their payment obligations under our current Master Supply Agreement and we paused shipments in late July as a result. While this customer has recently made several payments on their outstanding balance and is now close to becoming current, we continue to pause our shipments and engage in good faith towards resolution of certain ongoing claims of breach under the MSA. We do not have visibility into how quickly such resolution can be achieved…Instead of refurbishing our Fab 5 facility in the Philippines, which we now plan to utilize for the scale-up of our next-generation Maxeon 8 technology, we will convert our legacy Maxeon 3 capacity in the Philippines to Maxeon 7 technology. This will allow us to accelerate market introduction of world-record efficiency Maxeon 7 panels by several months and reduce capital expenditures by about $100M.” Maxeon also plans to begin the preparation of its Fab 3 facility in Malaysia to install a TOPCon solar cell pilot line ahead of the start-up of the planned manufacturing facility in Albuquerque. Maxeon’s Albuquerque solar cell and module factory remains on track. Restructuring actions are expected to result in a reduction of approximately 15% of the company’s global workforce, with most of the reductions expected to occur by the end of the year.