SolarCity cuts co-founder salaries to $1, announces job losses

Share

The uneven Q2 financial results reported by SolarCity earlier this month appear to have set in motion the first tangible steps towards stemming the losses that have become second nature to the firm.

In a regulatory filing yesterday, SolarCity confirmed that its compensation committee of its board of directors had agreed to reduce the salaries of CEO Lyndon Rive and his brother, CTO Peter Rive, from $275,000 to just $1.

In a largely symbolic gesture – and one that follows in the footsteps of SunPower, which did likewise with its CEO Tom Werner last week – the move forms part of a wider restructuring process that will see the solar lease provider incur charges of between $3 million to $5 million.

According to the SEC filing, the bulk of these losses will consist of severance benefits, which suggests an unspecified number of jobs will be lost at the company over the second half of the fiscal year 2016. SolarCity has confirmed that it will not be providing additional details on the number of roles lost at this stage.

These decisions form part of SolarCity’s fledgling effort to realign its operating expenses after another chastening set of financial losses in Q2. As reported by pv magazine, losses are nothing new to SolarCity, but its business model of placing long-term growth ahead of short-term profit has suffered more bumps in the road than the firm’s board had prepared for, with losses in H1 2016 well exceeding revenues.

SolarCity ended Q2 with just $146 million in cash and equivalents, but does expect an upturn after Q3, partly as a result of increased installations – the firm expects to install 315 – 415 MW in Q4.

However, annual guidance for the year has been reduced to 900 MW to 1 GW of new installations, down from earlier forecasts of 1 GW to 1.1 GW.

This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.

Popular content

Chinese developer switches on world’s largest perovskite-based PV plant

09 December 2024 MicroQuanta, a Chinese perovskite solar specialist, has commissioned a 8.2 MW PV facility based on its 90 W perovskite panels in eastern China.

Share

Leave a Reply

Please be mindful of our community standards.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.

Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.

You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.

Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.