Good morning everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining us for Array Technologies APA Investor Technology Showcase. Whether you've joined us here in person or you're attending virtually, we appreciate you spending your day with us. We're excited to bring together leaders from the Array and APA teams to provide a deeper look at our business, our technology, and our next phase of growth. This afternoon, we'll also have the opportunity to visit APA's manufacturing and engineering facilities, where you'll see many of these technologies in action and meet the teams behind them. We hope today's program gives you a deeper understanding of how Array and APA are working together to deliver value for our customers and our shareholders. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation includes forward-looking statements and certain non-GAAP financial statements and measures.
These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Please refer to this slide, as well as our SEC filings for additional information regarding these statements and the associated risks. Let's take a quick look at today's agenda. We'll begin with remarks from our CEO, Kevin Hostetler, who will discuss how the utility scale solar market is evolving and detail the strategy behind Array's expansion into a broader Balance-as-a-System platform. Kevin will then be joined by members of our leadership team, including APA founders and leaders, Josh and Joe Von Deylen, who will provide an overview of the APA business, its product portfolio, engineering expertise, and growth opportunities. Following a short break, you'll hear from Nick Strevel and Darin Green as they discuss Array's innovation roadmap, new product development, and technical sales strategy.
Kevin will then return to close the morning presentations before we open the floor for a Q&A with members of our executive leadership team. After lunch, we'll head to APA's facilities for a manufacturing tour, engineering demonstrations, and product showcases that bring much of today's presentation to life. To get us started, I'd like to share a short video highlighting the innovation and engineering that are at the core of what we're building together.
Good morning, everyone. Can I make sure we're on the right slide? I'm sorry. Got it. Okay. Good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here with me today, and I can't tell you how excited I am to talk about the future of Array and what we have ahead of us. The backdrop for our business remains incredibly strong and incredibly compelling. Demand for energy continues to grow, driven by electrification, data centers, transportation, and growth in some of the leading industries in the world. At the same time, we recognize our customer needs are changing. Utility scale solar projects are becoming larger and more complex. Those dynamics are creating new opportunities for Array to build on our leadership and trackers, and to deliver more value to our customers across these projects.
Today, we will show you how our Balance-as-a-System strategy, or BaaS, is coming to life, and why we believe the thesis around APA is both compelling and excelling, and what it means for the opportunity ahead. I want to start with the most important message for today. Array is evolving from a pure play tracker company into a technically integrated energy infrastructure platform. This expands our project share through interoperable solutions. While tracking will always remain one of the core elements of Array and a critical source of our differentiation, we see an opportunity that extends well beyond the tracker itself to capitalize on this growing demand for energy. We are building a broader interoperable platform that brings together services, hardware, software, and complementary technologies to improve the economics and execution of our customers' projects.
Over time, that creates an opportunity to extend our capabilities into some of the rapidly growing energy adjacent areas, including battery energy storage and the build-out of AI data centers. Importantly, we are building on what has always made Array successful. That is our strengths in engineering innovation and customer partnerships. We are applying these strengths across a greater portion of our customer projects. The result is more value for our customers, greater participation in project spend, and more opportunities for us to drive profitable growth. As we move through today's presentation, there are five key ideas I will encourage you to keep in mind. First, APA is a highly differentiated strategic asset with proven synergy potential. Second, customer demand is shifting toward more integrated utility scale solar solutions that simplify our customers' execution and improve their project economics.
Third, our Balance-as-a-System strategy is expanding our addressable market and increasing the opportunity for us to capture a greater share of customers' wallet. Fourth, APA and AWM demonstrate the discipline and repeatable M&A framework that we are executing. We are focused on strong businesses with complementary capabilities, meaningful synergy potential, and experienced management teams and cultures that we know will succeed as part of Array. Finally, these pieces come together to create what we believe is a sustainable customer value, more technically integrated platform that deepens our customer relationships and supports their long-term value creation. Before we go deeper, I want to take a minute to highlight a few numbers that demonstrate who Array is and the momentum that we currently have across our business today.
As many of you in the audience know, we ended the Q2 with our third consecutive record order book of $2.5 billion, up an impressive 37% year-over-year, and with a 1.5 times trailing 12-month book to bill. Clearly, you see that our growth is outpacing that of the industry. Importantly, the quality of our order book continues to improve. 50% of the order book is now with tier 1 utilities, IPPs, and developers. This speaks to both the quality of the backlog and the strength of our customer relationships behind that backlog. Our very purposeful innovation is accelerating, and you will note that we have already launched five major new products this year. The moat around our technology is also strengthening at an incredible pace. We have 259 active patents protecting the technology in Array.
What you may not realize is that we have another 230 patents pending, with more patents filed in the last 4.5 years than in the entire 30 years of Array's history prior to that combined. What I want you to take away from this slide is one word, and that's momentum. We have momentum in our order book, we have momentum with our customers, and momentum across our innovation pipeline. We believe the strategy we're discussing today gives us an opportunity to further build upon that momentum. These are the strategic priorities that we laid out at the start of the year. We've made meaningful progress across each of these. We've accelerated new product development, we've expanded in key international markets, and we continue to put customer needs at the center of our innovation and our investment decisions.
You can see that momentum in our numbers as new products now account for roughly 50% of that record order book. As we disclosed in our recent earning materials, the new products also will represent 50% of our 2026 revenues as well. Importantly, the strategy we're discussing today builds directly on these priorities and the progress we've already made. A few words about the market backdrop that we're participating in. We're operating in a significant market, and it gives us room to execute our strategy. The overall utility scale tracker market domestically represents about $4.3 billion of addressable market. As we add the foundations in fixed tilt by bringing on APA, we add another approximately $1.7 billion opportunity. AWM adds another $150 million in wire management opportunity in the U.S., and up to an additional $250 million market opportunity globally.
At the same time, underlying demand remains strong, with utility scale solar deployments expected to range between 36 and 39 gigawatts per year through 2030. Utility scale and battery storage now represent 79% of the planned U.S. electricity capacity additions this year in 2026. We're not simply participating in an attractive market, we're expanding the number of ways that Array can participate in that market and the amount we can deliver in terms of value on each project. While this slide focuses on the U.S. domestic opportunity, over time, we also see opportunities to extend APA and AWM and other parts of our existing platform faster internationally. Longer term, our ambition extends into adjacent energy infrastructure markets, where our capabilities and our customer relationships can create additional value. The reason we believe our strategy is working starts with our customers.
The size of each and every project we deliver is growing. The site environments are more diverse and much more difficult. Soil conditions are much more complex. All of this creates greater execution complexity and risk for our development partners. As a result, our customers and EPC partners are increasingly valuing solutions that reduce the number of interfaces, simplify installation and coordination, and lower their execution risk while improving their total cost of ownership. This is also an important part of differentiation for Array. Our goal is to continue to support our EPC partners, not to put a portfolio together that begins to compete with those EPC partners. We want to engineer solutions that make their jobs easier. Fewer interfaces, simpler installation, better reliability, and greater confidence in delivering their projects on schedule. This is what is meant by an integrated solution.
We're integrating our technology so customers and EPC partners can execute with more certainty and more efficiency. To be very clear, it's our customers' needs that is ultimately driving the evolution of our platform. What you see here is how we've responded to those changing customer needs over time. We've continued to innovate around our core tracker platform while deliberately expanding into complementary capabilities through both organic innovation and M&A. Late in 2024, we had a vision to create a world-class engineering and innovation center where we would relocate and co-locate engineering resources, product management, product marketing, and our technical selling resources. We also added an expanded customer experience and conference center dedicated to the rapid collection of direct voice of our customer.
Now, those of you that know Array may know that prior to this, our engineering resources and marketing resources, and frankly, we didn't have a whole lot of product management resources back then, prior to this launch, were spread throughout the U.S. We'd have pockets of engineers in Houston, in North Carolina, in Denver, in Austin, and it was really sub-optimized. We had the opportunity to bring them together into one location, increase our investment in innovation and new product development, increase the strength of those teams, and really focusing on acceleration of our new product development initiatives. It was a really simple thesis. Bring in high-performing teams, increase the investment in new product development, and drive customer-centered innovation. This is exactly what you're seeing today.
Our pace of innovation is accelerating with those five major product launches in 2026 alone, including the OmniTrack 2.0, the DuraTrack D2S, the DuraTrack 60° variant, and the Atlas suite of products that was the joint effort between Array and the APA team you'll hear about a little bit later. A couple of important points. In the first three years since we launched our terrain-following tracker, OmniTrack, the OmniTrack has now taken over the DuraTrack in terms of percentage of our backlog. That speaks to two things. One, the customers are adopting our terrain-following tracker. Its features and benefits are really being realized and appreciated. Second, that the sites our customers are working on are getting more and more difficult with a lot more terrain flexibility requirements.
In terms of our portfolio for severe weather mitigation, we now have a portfolio of standard and higher angle tracker solutions for 52 degrees, 60 degrees, and the extreme 77-degree stow angles, which allow our customers to optimize the intersection of their CapEx and the severe weather mitigation requirements for each specific site. When you combine this with our leading SmarTrack software suite, including our patented and leading hail alert response system, we believe we have the best-in-class solutions for our customers relative to severe weather mitigation. At the same time, APA brings into our business engineered foundations, the new alternative foundation lines, fixed tilt, and then the team at AWM adds another critical interface through wire management, engineering, design, and product solutions. Embedded in the DNA of each of these products we're now delivering is the voice of customer.
They are engineered to expand our addressable market, increase our share of wallet, and ultimately improve the economics and execution of our customers' projects. These are the common threads behind how we're growing our platform. While we sit and watch the presentation materials today, I can't wait. I'm literally giddy and excited to have you join us out in the field to see these products. This is where the rubber meets the road. When you come out this afternoon, and look, we may be dancing through raindrops, I'm not sure, so don't wear your best shoes. When you actually see these products out, this is where the rhetoric, it will resonate. You will see how we've integrated these products. You will very clearly see the value driven by integration of these products.
You will see how interoperable we've made these products to work and optimize together. W e'll talk a lot about how each one of these innovations are going to save our customers money, increase their reliability, and increase their confidence in delivering their projects on time with lower risk. When we talk about our Balance-as-a-System strategy or BaaS, this is ultimately where we're going. We're building from a foundation of trackers into a broader platform spanning engineering and design services, foundations, electrical balance of systems, controls, and software, and AI. The opportunity for us isn't simply to sell more products, it's to engineer these technologies together so the entire system performs better.
For our customers, that means we can help them generate a higher energy yield, lower their installed cost, get greater installation efficiency in a market where labor is becoming increasingly more critical, and ultimately drive stronger project economics. For us at Array, it means greater participation in the overall project spend, higher recurring revenues through expansion of our engineering software and services platforms, deeper customer relationships, and additional avenues for longer term growth. Increasingly, we see the opportunities to take the same model beyond utility scale into the broader energy infrastructure ecosystems. This is a very deliberate and differentiated framework behind how we're building our platform. First, we look for category-leading businesses in adjacent markets where we believe Array can add value. Then we integrate those capabilities into a broader platform, and importantly, we co-engineer and integrate the technologies together.
That will be on full display this afternoon for you. This technical interoperability is very critical to our thesis. Look, procurement is literally the middle name of many of our EPC industry partners. We aren't interested in a basic assembly of a collection of unrelated businesses or products simply to provide our customers one invoice. We don't think of the word bundling as advantageous long term. Our goal is to create better customer outcomes, improve performance, simpler installation, stronger project economics, and to translate those outcomes for us into higher share of wallet, improved value capture, stronger customer relationships, and long-term shareholder value. APA is an excellent example of that model in practice, and AWM gives us an opportunity to repeat it.
I want to talk a little bit more about how we approach M&A and how we think differently about M&A than others, because we are very disciplined about what belongs within the Array platform. We will start with strategic fit and market leadership. We want leading businesses in each of these areas that we pursue. We want them to be differentiated businesses with strong customer pull that advances our long-term platform strategy. The technical interoperability, as we talked about earlier, is critical to us. Incredibly important. We want products and capabilities that can work with our core Array Technologies and create a more integrated and compelling customer offering. Again, you will see that on full display this afternoon. The business also needs to meet our financial criteria. We want very attractive profitability or a clear, very near-term path to it.
We have a disciplined valuation approach, and we are looking for strong cash generation potential. Finally, management and culture matter tremendously to us. With both APA and AWM, we are partnering with strong operators with an incredible depth of knowledge in their sectors who want to remain part of the business and who want to continue to go building their business alongside us at Array. You will hear shortly from Josh and Joe Von Deylen, the founders of APA, who are great examples of exactly this. I will take a minute to note that Scott Rand and Dan Smith, the co-founders of AWM, have joined us in the audience today, and they will be on-site a little bit later this afternoon to help you further understand how the wire management adjacency fits into our platform. You will see that they will be joining us in the field visit this afternoon.
We also then look very closely at synergy potential, both in terms of revenue opportunities from our cross-selling initiatives, but also cost opportunities leveraging Array's scale across our supply chain and through SG&A leverage. Let me be absolutely clear. We are not looking for M&A just for M&A's sake or just to get bigger. We are looking for businesses that make our integrated solutions much, much stronger. When you think about this framework and you apply it to APA and then to AWM, you can easily see why we were attracted to both of these businesses. APA gives us a leading position in fixed-tilt applications and foundations, and an experienced engineering-led management team, and technology that can be integrated directly into Array's existing hardware and software platforms.
Importantly, we also saw meaningful opportunities for commercial and operational synergies, and you will hear shortly from Josh and Joe Von Deylen how much evidence we are already seeing and how our thesis is playing out exactly as expected. AWM checks many of the same boxes in terms of a market-leading position in wire management, proprietary engineering and IP, strong operators, and products that fit naturally across our Balance-as-a-System platform. It also gives us that exposure into adjacent opportunities where they are driving high growth in battery energy storage systems and data center applications, extending our platform beyond utility scale solar. The takeaway I want to emphasize here is repeatability. We have a framework, we know what we are looking for, and we intend to remain disciplined in terms of how we deploy capital against our framework.
A few more ways about AWM in terms of how we're actuating our strategy. AWM is just the latest example of our Balance-as-a-System strategy in action and how we are demonstrating how we are thinking about expanding the Array platform beyond trackers. It is a leading wire management provider with proprietary engineering and IP and strong position in utility scale solar. What makes the opportunity particularly compelling is that its capabilities extend beyond solar. AWM now gives us entry in a platform to participate in battery energy storage and the high growth data center applications, two attractive adjacencies within the broader energy infrastructure market. Strategically, we see opportunities to leverage Array's global commercial reach and operating scale while creating more integrated solutions that strengthen the value we can deliver to our customers.
The financial profile is equally attractive, with $153 million base purchase price, which is approximately 6x trailing EBITDA, mid to high 30% EBITDA margins, and expected high single digit plus adjusted EPS accretion in year one before synergies. This is exactly the type of acquisition we are looking for, a well-run market leader with strong financial characteristics, differentiated and protected technology, and clear opportunities to create additional value once they become part of Array. Our transaction is expected to close in the Q3 , subject to customary closing conditions and approvals. Let me spend a few minutes on APA, because that is what we are here to talk about today. It gives you real tangible evidence of what our model can deliver. One year ago this week, we acquired APA in August of 2025, and you will witness today the integration is far ahead of schedule.
The commercial momentum together has been strong, with APA having a 1.5x year-to-date book to bill, A-Frame quote request up approximately 50% quarter-over-quarter in Q2. In our earnings, we referenced that the APA revenue is up 17% year-over-year. This is a number that will accelerate as we progress through the balance of the year. APA's average project pipeline size is up 155%. It is more than doubled compared to the pre-acquisition levels, reflecting APA's increasing penetration into the larger utility scale projects. Innovation at APA has accelerated as well, with 32 active and pending patents. This is evidence that the strategic thesis we had when we acquired APA is being validated and executed. Importantly, we believe there is considerably more opportunity ahead for us working together with APA.
While we are incredibly pleased with the APA progress to date, we are still early in what we believe APA can become as part of Array. Over the next year, we are focused on four areas. The first is to continue to strengthen the operating model by further either integrating or aligning finance, IT, supply chain, commercial, and product functions. Second is in scaling the integrated product offering, including the launch of our recently launched Atlas suite of products, our new Tracker Plus foundation solutions, and further execution into our now aligned Array and APA product roadmaps. Third, continuing to capture our synergy savings in sourcing, supply chain procurement, and maximizing the 45X capture and synergies we have ahead of us. Fourth, accelerating the commercial momentum by bringing APA's foundation expertise to Array's customer relationships, therefore pursuing larger utility scale opportunities, including some of those larger international opportunities.
This brings us to what the opportunity can mean on a financial basis. We see a path for APA to deliver significant double-digit revenue CAGR over the next three years while continuing to improve an already attractive margin profile. We expect engineered foundations to become a much larger portion of the business, and as you get out to the field this afternoon, you will very quickly understand exactly why. Moving from approximately 20% to approximately 50% of the revenue within our near-term strategic horizon. We also see an opportunity to build the international business towards approximately 15% of revenue in this same time period. Over time, we believe the APA business can operate at an adjusted gross margin in the high 20% range. The result is a business that we believe can become higher growth, higher margin, and a more diversified part of Array.
Next, that brings us to a few words about our capital allocation strategy. APA and AWM demonstrate how we think about capital allocation for Array more broadly. First, we will continue to invest organically in our business, funding high return opportunities that extend our product leadership and expand areas like software services and some of our adjacent solutions. Second, we remain focused on strengthening our capital structure. This includes options to take out our preferred shares as they transition to cash service, managing our leverage over time, and proactively addressing our 2028 tranche of convert maturity, all while preserving the flexibility to continue investing in growth. Third, we will remain disciplined and strategic on M&A. We are focused on businesses that strengthen our platform, meet our financial return criteria, and create clear customer and shareholder value.
Our record $2.5 billion order book supports our growing earnings and free cash flow trajectory, which we expect will expand our capacity across each of these three priorities. Now, before I turn it over to Josh and Joe, let me bring this back to the bigger picture, and I will finish by reiterating how our platform strategy creates sustainable customer value. We are expanding beyond trackers, which increases our addressable market, our share of wallet, and the amount of project spend where Array gets to participate. We are strengthening the customer value proposition through better project economics, improved installation efficiency, and lowering customer execution risk. We are building a more integrated platform that increases our relevance to our customers while creating additional avenues for growth tomorrow. This is what we believe creates sustainable customer value.
Not simply having more products, but engineering those products together in a way that delivers measurable value to our customers. APA is one of the clearest examples of this strategy and how it is coming to life. With that, I would like to turn it over to Josh and Joe Von Deylen to take you deeper into APA, the business that they have built, the technology behind it, and where we see the opportunity from here. Josh, Joe?
All right. Mic working? Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate it.
Great.
Good morning, everyone. All right. Good morning. I'm Josh Von Deylen. I'm CEO and one of the co-founders of APA.
Hi, I'm Joe Von Deylen . I'm the COO and also one of the co-founders of APA Solar.
We are brothers. I'm the older brother. That's why I'm the CEO. Who we are, our dad, Dave , he started an automotive company 40+ years ago, and the company that you'll be at today is Alex Products. Alex Products was his company. It was a tier 2 automotive company. He grew it to be a very successful company, well-known in the local community as one of the best companies out there. Hired a lot of employees. Joe and I's history where we grew up, we grew up in business, we grew up in manufacturing, we grew up in automation. This is what we've done our entire lives. We've never done anything else between automotive manufacturing and APA Solar. This is our career, this is our life, this has been our business. We've enjoyed every minute of it.
In 2008, when I graduated college, it was the automotive downturn, the banking industry. You guys are probably familiar with the automotive downturn. Alex Products and my dad said, "Okay, what can we do besides automotive? What are the other options out there to look at?" It was my job at the time to say, "What can we do that is alternative to automotive?" That is where Alex Products Alternatives, so APA, that is where you get the name. APA Solar, that is the name. We rebranded. It is just APA Solar now, so no Alex Products. Alex Products, my dad actually sold his company about 10 years ago, which actually worked out really well for us because the owners were from Tennessee and they decided to go back to Tennessee. We get to take over their manufacturing building that you will get to see today.
They actually recently left one of their other buildings in Bryan, Ohio, which we got to take that over also. Also, a lot of the management that they have there, which was grade A management team. We knew these people for a long time, so we were able to partner with them and bring them on at APA. A lot of the people that you will meet today, Kim over there, she is from Alex Products. Joe Schliescher, our CFO, he is over there. He is from Alex Products. You will meet James Eiden today. He is also from Alex Products. G reat team that we got to bring over to the APA team. 17 years ago, 2008, we started APA Solar. Who we are.
Currently now, we are a leading provider in the fixed-tilt racking industry, serving both the fixed-tilt market and the tracker market in alternative foundations, and we do a lot of engineering services for the solar industry. We serve both the distributed generation market, the DG market. That is the smaller projects that you guys are familiar with, like the community solar projects. That is really where we got our start from every company, basically, and the DG got their start in that spot. Over the past two, three, four years, we have really been now growing into that utility space, and the acquisition with Array Technologies, with APA, has really now catapulted us into that utility space, which has been absolutely exciting for the past 12+ months here. We have a strong Midwest and Northeast presence.
We do projects all over the country, and we are really growing into that more utility space out there in the Southwest market. Why customer choose APA? Foundations. Foundations on your project is really the pinnacle to start all your engineering, your entire job, your geotech. If the foundations on your projects are designed wrong and it goes bad, pretty much your entire project is going to go bad, generally from day one. If you design with the right foundation from day one and have your project engineered right, generally your project is going to go very smooth. Early-stage engineering, getting those geotechs, looking at that corrosion studies, getting on-site, learning more about that project than almost the owners of the project even know about their own site. That is what APA does, and you will get a seat today. Vertical integration. The structure of APA's company is absolutely awesome.
We have so much control over what we do, from the engineering to the on-site testing to the actual manufacturing for on-time deliveries, customer service, and then even the installation. We offer installation service to customers. If they're not familiar with a ground screw or helical, we can install it for them. Proven track record. Most of APA's clients, almost basically all of our clients are repeat clients. They use our product. They like our product. Our products are just not the cheap products that you can roll form and put bolt throughs and assemble like Erector Set. Our products are engineered products. They're thought-through products. These are the premium products out there. Customers like it. They use it. They want to continue to use it. These are what makes their project successful. Positioned for growth. We are absolutely in a great position right now.
The acquisition with Array couldn't have been a better decision for Joe and I. The bankability of APA being a privately held company has maybe held us back a little bit because you just can't catapult into those monster utility scale projects. Who's going to award Joe and I a gigawatt project? Probably not a whole lot, but who's going to award it to Array Technologies? A lot of people. That is what they do. Integrated tracker and foundation solutions. That's what we've been working on for a long time, but we now, since partnering with Array, we got access right to their engineering team. We can do so much more now integrating our products together. Scaling manufacturing for larger and more complex projects.
As we're really getting into this utility space, we are positioned really well with our 150,000 sq ft manufacturing facility that you're going to see today, and we already had been working on 130,000 sq ft manufacturing facility 18 minutes down the road from that in Bryan, Ohio, and that is online now. It does have a first shift now. Products are starting to go through there, but we have a ton of floor space for scaling opportunity at that particular facility. Looking at the timeline here. In 2008, that's when we started, that's when APA was created, and from that 2008- 2017, we were really focused on that above ground racking system, making the actual racking hardware, making the steel components. We had this modular racking system. If we had hours to get into the history of APA, I would love it.
I would talk forever about our modular racking system. Wasn't the best system in the world. At the time, it was cool, it was unique, it was creative. We utilized the micro helical with it. I think it was around 2017, though. That's when we were introduced to ground screws and looking at the Titan system and alternate foundations, and we really switched from being an above ground racking company to more a foundations company. The foundation is where everything starts for your clients to make sure everything is successful. If you look at that chart, in 2018, that's when we looked at the Titan product to bring that online.
It was a culmination of the last 10 years of, "Let's take everything we've learned, and how can you make the best product in the fixed-tilt industry that clients are looking for to make successful?" As we looked at the Titan and introduced the ground screws, that's where you can quickly see there was a Titan Duo product there launched in 2019, and that product was the one that really catapulted APA. Taking the best product that we knew, combining it with ground screws. That took us from basically that straight up trajectory that you see on there that had been very exciting for the last how many years at APA, in that very rapid growth pattern. In that 2019 timeframe also, we were introduced to Tracker Foundation. At the time, we didn't produce a tracker. We're not interested in producing a tracker.
Fixed tilt, we are very good at it, really focused in that market. T here was clearly a need in the foundation industry for trackers. Everybody uses a W-beam, a driven pile, and there's hard soil conditions, there's soft soil conditions, and how can you combat those on a tracker project? It's a lot of risk for a project when you have those. We were introduced to A-Frame in 2019, and that's really been Joe's part of the business that he really took a hold of and really focused on, and he really grew that A-Frame business in that timeframe. 2025, we're acquired by Array. Very exciting times for us. I n 2026, launching that Atlas product only two weeks ago. Just into that, very exciting on that portion of the business. I really like this slide because this tells you a lot about APA.
You'll see the products on here. When you go to the display field earlier today, there will be a lot more, but this really shows it in a nutshell of who we really are. If you look at the foundation side of the screen, you see a ground screw and the helical. Those are the main two. 80% of the foundations we put in the ground are the ground screw. The ground screw is the ideal foundation. We manufacture them right in-house. You'll see lots of equipment manufacturing these in-house. These are good for hard soils, rocky soils, cobble soils, gleachy soils, bedrock soils. Almost every type of soil, a ground screw works for. The only place that a ground screw doesn't work is when the ground is soft. When the ground is soft, you can't use a ground screw because there's not enough threads on it.
It doesn't hold. That's where you have a helical. It's the opposite, almost, of ground screw. It has these big flights on there that really hold that soil. Between the ground screw and the helical, we can cover almost every soil condition that's out there, subsurface, underneath the ground. Underneath there, those top two, the ground screw and the helical, they work for all of our fixed-tilt products and all of our tracker products. The ground screw and the helical. The other three below there, the C-Pile, the Pour-N-Go, the GeoBallast, those are fixed-tilt only products. The C-Pile is really important. We don't sell a lot of it. Maybe it's 1%, 2% of our business. I t is important because we learned a lot about C-Pile foundation in the fixed-tilt industry.
It's a roll form, 11 gauge or nine gauge C-Pile, that 80 KSI, so very high strength steel that we can drive into a ground with a pile driver, and we've had a ton of success with it. We took that success and that's really how we implemented that on our Atlas I product, which is a sigma pile, which is quite a bit different than a C-Pile, but has a lot of the characteristics, just a little bit different engineering that goes into it to create a very good solution for the tracker portion of the industry. The Pour-N-Go solution, that's a ballasted. It looks cool, but has concrete in it. Concrete is very expensive, but some customers really like the idea of concrete. The GeoBallast, that's a product you'll get to see today. It's very cool, very inventive.
It's one of a kind at APA, and it's actually the leading ballasted solution that's out there. Is there a ton of ballasted projects? No, but they're a very nice high revenue, high margin job that APA does enjoy being one of the leaders in that business. Fixed tilt mounting systems. On the top, you'll see that's our Titan system. Our Titan system, that is our number one racking system. The top one, the TITAN Pile. Again, we only do maybe 1% or 2% with that. The Titan Duo, that's 80+ percent of what we do. That particular product, you'll get to see it out there. There's quite a few different versions of the Titan Duo, from a crystalline version, from then a First Solar version. We actually have a TITAN 3hp, Titan Duo 3 High Portrait, and we have a TITAN E/W system.
Those are really unique products that you'll get to see in the field today. The Titan Go system, that's something we actually did a soft launch on this year. It's a super exciting product because it's for really a distribution model. With normal racking systems, it's a lead time. You give us your site layout, we engineer the product, we create a BOM, it has to go to manufacturing. B y the time you get a PO, it's 10- 12 weeks for a lead time to produce your custom racking system. The Titan Go's different. It has this really optimized engineering design that clients can place an order and in two to three weeks, we can deliver the racking system to them. R eally designed for more of that DG space, that 1, 2, 3, 5 -megawatt size projects.
We're also finding really from the smaller project size and then actually in the utility, there's a good place for it, too, because we can really optimize some of the solutions there with a bolt through, and it has a very unique pattern on it that we can show that it actually has a really good place in that particular market. Underneath there is the Ready Rack. That's really a legacy product of APA. We still do a lot with it. When I say a lot, maybe it's 10% of our business. It really in the distribution portion of a company. A lot of people like the Ready Rack. We have a large following of clients that still like to use the Ready Rack, so it's a very versatile system.
We will keep it in our portfolio of products probably forever, just because it is a very good product that can be used on a lot of sites, and clients really like it. Then you got the tracker interface portion. The A-Frame system that we originally started out was a welded version, then we quickly graduated to a 2.0 version. The 2.0 is what we currently sell still today. The 2.0, we do sell it to Array Technologies clients, but we also sell it to all clients. It is agnostic. An EPC can choose any tracker they want. They can come to APA, and they can buy the A-Frame 2.0 from us, and we can supply it to them.
That being said, as we are acquired by Array Technologies, it gave us the opportunity to work directly with Array, with their engineering team to really create an optimized solution. We took full advantage of that right out of the gate. As soon as we were acquired, as soon as everything was good to move forward, their engineering team, our engineering, put their heads together, and that is where we create the Atlas product. I won't talk too much more about it because then I'll steal all Joe Von Deylen's thunder. We'll keep going here. Unmatched customer value proposition. This slide's great for the vertical integration of APA. The in-house engineering that we have, we take all the customer's information. We have great sales team. We have a great engineering team. We have a great project management team.
They all sit almost in Northwest Ohio, where you will see today all on the same campus. We're very well integrated together as a team. In-house manufacturing. How many other companies like APA can produce almost all their products in-house under one or two roofs that we own? The vertical integration, it really allows us to be able to do that custom manufacturing, guarantee that on-time delivery. A customer needs something in a hurry or rush, we have the capabilities to do it. We are the manufacturers of it. We can do it. We can make it right there in the U.S.A. Foundation testing. We have one of the premier foundation testing programs of the industry.
I don't know if there's really any other company out there that has a testing program as large as APA and does the amount of testing that we do on every single site. When we get into testing information, I think Nick Strevel said earlier, it might've been a little bit boring, but the testing portion is, in my mind, one of the greatest values of APA. We really de-risk that project site for you guys, for the EPCs, for the customers. D e-risking a project site for the customers, that is one of the biggest values of APA, providing a solution, de-risking that site, and basically guaranteeing on their bottom line at the end of the job. Field execution and support.
There's not too many other companies that have 100+. Actually, we have, can't say how many people, but it's a very large amount of people in the field today all the way across the country right now working in the field. We can install. If you're not familiar with ground screws, if EPCs aren't, I'm normally used to talking and selling to people. When I say yeah, trying to sell you guys some solar, sorry. U sually, our clients aren't familiar with selling ground screws or helicals. If they're not familiar with it, we can install it. We can offer a quote. We can offer to say, "Hey, it only." Some customers are like, "Hey, it costs X amount to install it," and we're like, "No, it's only half that. We can give you a quote. We can provide it.
If you want a full turnkey service, APA can provide that." Not only that, it gives us, since we're on so many projects, we're in probably 15+ projects right now in the field installing services. We have an employee basically in every corner of the United States right now. If a customer has a question, they need service, they need something, APA can go to that site. We can help them. We can provide that service. If they need us to build a golden row, we can do that. The APA display field, we're actually building an 8-megawatt project right down the road. They came and built the entire display field in two weeks, and it was probably more like five days. They built the whole thing in five days, very rapid, very quick. How many other people have that capability in-house that have that team?
It's exciting at APA to have that. Drivers for the fixed tilt and engineered foundation. One major growth factor for APA has been the instant bankability. As I talked about before, being a privately held company, that was one thing that held us back. These large customers having these 100, 200 gigawatt size project would always talk to Joe and I, would get quotes from us and say, "How can we really give you guys a $20 million or $30 million purchase order? You guys are this privately held company." When we were acquired by Array, that changed everything. It gave us the bankability of being a part of a large publicly traded company. It quickly turned all their heads and said, "Okay, this is a viable solution for us. We are interested. Can we come have those conversations, open up those doors?" That is very exciting.
We're also benefiting from two important market trends at the same time. Fixed-tilt demand continues to benefit from AI data center demand and utility scale growth. This is something that was surprising to us. We didn't see this coming in the fixed-tilt market. T he fixed-tilt market, every single year for the past three years, we have had a record year on fixed tilt. We are going to have another record year on fixed tilt this year, and we're going to have another record year on fixed tilt next year. Fixed tilt is very exciting times right now in our industry. It's largely driven right now by that utility scale growth for those data centers. Solar development expanding into more difficult terrain, engineered foundations becoming increasingly valuable.
In the past, a lot of tracker projects would cherry-pick a little bit of the sites that the driven piles would work really well in. Now, it is what sites are available and what sites they can build on, and then they figure out what foundation they have to use to build that site. A lot of those great sites are gone, and now you got a lot more difficult sites with topography and hard subsurface conditions, and that is where APA, we really excel at. We are already seeing that reflection in our own business. Since joining Array, our average pipeline project size has doubled as we participate in more large utility scale solar projects. From there, I will turn it over to Joe so he can walk through a few slides, talk more about the foundations.
Cool. Thank you, Josh. Hi, everybody. Joe Von Deylen. I am going to go through what are the soil conditions or why do people have an interest in our foundation solutions. If you look at the slide here, you can see there are four main categories. We have areas of the country where you have a lot of ground frost conditions. These ground frost conditions, if they penetrate the ground more than, say, about two feet, it becomes very difficult for driven piles that rely solely on skin friction to hold in the ground. As you go through seasonal freeze/thaw, those piles can, one, heave and move, and that can create issues over time for them, with the O&M and just the general function of the racking systems. Those ground frost conditions can cause an issue. Another thing is the shallow restrictive layers.
There are other parts of the country where it is just physically hard to get something to go on the ground. You have bedrock, you have cobbles, boulders, cemented soils, and it does not matter how hard you pound a pile, even if you get it to go in, it is likely that you damaged it or you might then need to remediate the top of that pile, because it went through a very hard layer of the ground. We see that pretty consistently through different areas of the country. There is another area which is expansive soils, expansive clay type soils. These are really when the ground becomes wet and then it dries, it shrinks and it swells, and expands and it contracts. It does that over time, and again, that can lead to movement of your foundations, which can cause issues for the racking system.
We have solutions that we can help combat expansive soils. Then finally, we have conditions with weak soils, and that is basically where you have loose sands, you have high water tables, saturated soils, soft organic soils where you do not get very much skin friction. The density is just not there. It does not hold the foundations very well. Something to note is if you look at all four of these different, or these four maps, if you overlay them, this is not a niche market. These things happen all over the country, at large scales. There are areas of the country that driven piles work great, but there is just as much of the country that driven piles, they have issues. In APA, we have solutions to solve those issues. Historically, let us talk about the more traditional approach. It is with the driven beams.
The driven beams, H piles, I-beams, W piles, a lot of different names for it. They are very good if you do not have too much ground frost. Say, two feet or less, you can pound them in, you can get enough skin friction to hold them, and they are not going to move and heave. I f you have more than that, the surface area of them pretty large, and that can become a tremendous force pulling on them, and you have to add additional depth or additional steel to get them to hold in place. That additional steel is just additional cost, it is additional weight, it is harder to handle. It can make a project more challenging to build.
Again, we talked about how if you have hard cemented soils, if you have boulders, cobbles, it does not matter how hard you pound the piles, you are going to have issues with those piles. They are going to become twisted, damaged. They may not actually reach the proper embedment depth, and then you have to pull it out and remediate it, drill a hole, put it in concrete, something like that. Very time consuming, very expensive to do that remediation process. There are another things with that soft soil we talked about where you have to put those piles very deep to hopefully find some sort of layer that has bearing capacity.
Again, anytime you have to put those deeper, you are exposing yourself to more subsurface risk, more possibilities you might hit something or just, again, more steel, more cost to produce a foundation that is going to support your solar tracker system. Historically, that is where APA, we have differentiated ourself from the driven pile market. That has been, we are a good solution provider when you have those soil conditions. Those soil conditions, as I mentioned, they exist all across the country. When you have solutions like ground screws or helical piles, they can alleviate basically any concern you have of frost heave because we are putting the threads of those screws or those helical flights down below the frost line and non-frost susceptible soils, and it does not expose that foundation to frost heaving anymore. It works very similarly with the expansive clay.
Once you get below that expansive layer into a non-active zone, we can eliminate the risk that those piles could move over time. The ground screws, as Josh mentioned, they work really great for cobbly, rocky, dense, hard soils. They even go into solid bedrock if you use a small pre-drilled pilot hole. That pre-drilled pilot hole is significantly different than pre-drilling for a driven beam. It is much smaller, it is much more cost-effective and a repeatable process that we can recommend to customers to deal with those challenging soils. I think Josh already hit a little bit on the helical piles, how they work really great in soft soils. We have a lot of projects here in the Midwest where you have organic soils or sand. The helicals, we can adjust the diameter.
We can put a couple different helical flights on them to increase the bearing capacity and get more holding strength in shallower embedment depths. We don't have to go nearly as deep. We can reduce the amount of steel and reduce the amount of risk by putting more steel in the ground. Another cool feature with these products is that you're using two small foundations, and you're sharing the load through an A-Frame Interface. That A-Frame Interface benefits from the geometry, basically, of a triangle. It's very strong in strong axis, which means we can use a lot less steel, again, above ground, because we're not supporting all that load just on one foundation that has to support it. We're using two foundations that can support a strong load. You also get features with vertical height adjustment, east-west adjustment, which makes it easier to build over topography.
Now that we've talked about where we've came from, how our solutions solve some of the issues with soil, let's talk about the new feature that we've come out with Array. As we mentioned, the A-Frame 2.0, it works with basically all the tracker companies on the market today. It is agnostic. It's been very successful, one of the fastest-growing parts of our business. A little over a year ago, it was like, we need to get APA and Array's engineers, and let's co-develop an integrated solution that is not cumbersome by extra parts and pieces because we're making it for everybody. We're specifically designing it for one purpose, and that's where the Atlas and the Atlas II comes into play. At first, the top of the pile, we have a new Atlas bearing.
The Atlas bearing is pretty cool because it's been designed specifically to accommodate all the new stow strategies Array has come out. If you have the 52-degree system for moderate hail, you have the new 60-degree system for a little bit more extreme, and then it also can accommodate the 77 DuraTrack Hail XP simply by changing the hard stop, and that's done in the factory, delivered to the customers with that correct hard stop. W hatever your hail stow strategy is, the Atlas bearing can accommodate that. Another cool feature is we have an Atlas I, which is entering into the driven pile market. Historically, those driven piles, they all come straight from the mill. They're hot forge beams. They're kind of a commodity thing. There's no proprietary secret sauce to it. When you have the Atlas I, we've created value.
We have a new interface, we have adjustment, we have a new bearing, and we give the customers more solution for driven pile standard soil conditions. Josh will talk about that here in a second. The Atlas II is the new A-Frame that's specifically designed for Array that reduces components. It listens to customer feedback of how do we reduce the amount of fasteners that we have to assemble in the field, and how do we make it easier for those contractors to deploy at a mass scale. I'll hand it over to Josh quick to go through the Atlas I foundation.
Thank you, Joe. Oh. Got excited to use the clicker. All right. The Atlas I. What is the Atlas I? From my knowledge, I do not believe there is anything else like it in North America that is offered out there right now. The Atlas I really came from APA. We talked a little bit about our testing program. Joe will talk about it more. We have this premier testing program that we go on site to test these challenging sites for hard soil conditions for ground screws and helicals. A lot of times on these particular projects, there is good soil conditions for a driven I-beam. How can we look at providing our clients a good alternative solution to an I-beam?
There has got to be a better way than just taking a huge extruded piece of steel and just smashing this thing into the ground repeatedly every single time. It works, it works great, but there has got to be a better way, a smarter way, a way to engineer around it to provide a lot of value for our clients. That is where we took the best ideas from APA in our 18 years of history, worked with the Array Technologies engineers and say, "Guys, what can we do with your guys' loads? What can we do with our C-Pile and our foundation experience?" We created the Atlas I foundation. What is it? It is a two-part pile. The pile that goes in the ground, most people use today, that W-beam. You can still use the W-beam. You can still drive it in the ground.
Basically, we cut off three, four feet of it. You only have to drive it in the ground whatever normal depth you would, and then you leave it out of the ground 24 inches, plus or minus two inches. You got this huge four-inch window. It is not precision driven in. Basically, it is just drive it in on the pin and go to the next one. You can use the W-beam, or you can use a sigma pile. A sigma pile is much more like the C-Pile that we talked about earlier. There is a lot of advantages to the sigma pile because this is coiled steel that we can roll form, we can roll form in-house. We can really control the cost of it, we can control the lead time of it, and you can pre-punch all the holes in it.
There is just a lot of value to it, versus like a W-beam, you would have to understand what W-beams you would need, then you would have to place an order with the mill, and you are really at that steel mill's mercy on when you are going to get that lead time, and you are going to get your piece of component. Versus a roll forming machine. The coils are there. They are ready to go. It is kind of like a big printer. Tell us what you need to print. We start printing it. It does take a little bit longer. W e can print all this coiled steel off, palletize it, and get it shipped to the site. The bottom portion in the foundation is a W-beam or a sigma pile, either one that a customer wants to choose.
The sigma pile is just a much better cost point if a client is looking to utilize that product for their particular site. Then you go above there. Now you have the interface. This interface is where a lot of the magic happens on the Atlas I. It has the adjustability. There is a large amount of hole patterns that you can see in the bottom. This gives you plus or minus three inches of adjustability in one-inch increments, and there is actually more adjustability in there as we get to particular sites, like on the interior. Also, that interface piece, there is also different heights of it. I f we do need to extend it and go higher out of that plus or minus three inches, you simply swap it out for the different piece, which is all not generally a swap.
It is generally all laid out in the engineering, so you know where those particular pieces go on-site. Y ou got, on top, you got the Atlas bearing. The Atlas bearing, Joe talked a little bit about. It is a steel bearing, basically like Array Technologies' steel bearing, but the steel bearing has six nuts and bolts and fasteners so that you have a lot of adjustment in it. We do not need all that adjustment because we now have that adjustment in the interface portion. Joe will also talk about in the Atlas II, we do not need that adjustment. T he bearing, we took a lot of that adjustment out so that the bearing is a very cost-effective bearing. It is also a two-part bearing that you can take off, so you can put torque tubes on there. A lot of cool features in that bearing.
I will quit talking about it so I do not steal Joe's thunder on that one either. T here are a lot of highlights on this slide, so there is a lot of value we can provide today. When we go out to the display field, I will spend a lot more time on it. You will get to see it in real life. We will get into it in more detail, and a lot of it will make sense and go through every single one of these bullet points on there. Joe, I will turn it back over to you.
Cool. Thanks, Josh. Atlas II, really, where is this coming at? We are coming at customer feedback. Customers have told us with the A-Frame 2.0, they would like to see some fewer connections, fewer torqued connections to use in the field. That is really what we have aimed to optimize. At the top of the pile with the Atlas bearing, we only have two bolts that go through it to connect it. Today, with the A-Frame 2.0, you have six bolts at the top of the pier, plus another two bolts. E ight bolts that you have to tighten versus two. W e have reduced the number of connections that they have to touch. Today, with the steel bearing in A-Frame 2.0, you have 90-degree side brackets, a bearing in an interface. You have three components. Versus this, you just have a bearing and interface.
We reduced also the number of components they physically have to bring into the field with them, making their job a lot easier to deploy this at a large scale. We are talking hundreds of thousands of foundations on some of these sites, and the easier we can make it for them, it is just going to be a much more well-receptive product. Also, we are keeping a lot of the feedback that they said they really like exactly the same. At the bottom of the pier, we have those riser tubes. It gives it vertical height adjustment. You will see it in the field, how we can telescope in and out of the ground screws to raise and lower that pier.
That makes building over undulating topography a lot easier because you can go through, set all your foundations, and then independently of the foundation, raise or lower that top of pile to make sure it matches the curvature of the torque tube, especially if you are building terrain-following trackers like OmniTrack, where the torque tube actually flexes with the curvature of the land. Some other unique features are the component count just in general. The A-Frame 2.0 has over 60 components that make that product up. The Atlas II has less than 20 components. We are between 14 and 18 components, so significantly fewer components, which means it is easier for us as supply chain, easier us for pre-assembly, easier for the guys in the field just to manage that number of parts and pieces. Pretty cool features.
It is fully domestically made, so it will be made right there in probably the new Bryan, Ohio facility that we are making investments into new tooling with. The ground screws and helical piles pair with it. T hose helical piles and screws, as we talked, they complement each other very well, so you can go through different soil variations. Speaking of soil variations and kind of that, let us go into kind of testing and engineering, how we design our foundations. This is kind of, again, the foundations-first approach. This is what has made us really successful as a company because we can help de-risk your project from what is under the ground. Nobody can see it, they do not understand, and they find surprises.
We can help reduce some of those costs, reduce some of those risks, and improve just overall your project execution if you have a well-laid-out plan ahead of time before you get those guys in the field that are getting paid these expensive wages to deploy solar. Having that plan starts with the geotech. Every company gets a geotech for their site. The problem with these geotechs is they are usually pretty limited. They have a boring maybe every 20- 40 acres, across these 1,000-acre site or 2,000-acre sites, and that leaves you with large blind spots of areas that you do not really know what happened there.
It's just, "Well, I can see what happened here, and I can see what happened there, but everything in between, we don't really know." Historically, that's been an issue for us building our own projects is, "Well, we thought it was this here and here, but in the middle we had an issue," cost overruns, remediation. How do we avoid that from happening again? What is the lessons learned? We've started taking those geotechs, compiling them all into a huge library of information based on region, based on soil classification, saying, "Here's what historically we've seen with those geotech borings," it can help shape our opinion. A gain, we still have kind of those large blind spots because we're not getting enough data ahead of time. How do we get more data?
We develop the best testing program in the industry to go out and physically collect that data. We have APA employees, our own dedicated crews. This is all they do. They go around the country to all these solar projects, and they do these capacity and soil probings. Capacity tests, they're similar to what most geotech companies do, their tension and lateral capacity tests, they measure the mechanical capacity of that soil to hold the foundation so it doesn't pull out of the ground, or in a wind event, it doesn't tip or fall over. Horizontal and tension capacity tests. The difference with our capacity testing is the rate at which we do it. We do a capacity test every 5- 7 acres. You think on these utility projects where there's thousands of acres, we're doing hundreds of tests. We're doing tests all across the site.
We're reducing those blind spots, and we're being better prepared for what's happening in the soil. If we know how the soil is reacting to the foundations, it gives us a chance to optimize those foundations to reduce steel costs, to reduce embedment depth. If you can reduce steel costs, good, you're reducing money. If you reduce embedment depth, you're reducing exposure into the soil, where you could possibly have a risk of hitting something or something changing. We'll go through, we'll do those capacity tests, and we'll understand what is the best foundation and how can we optimize that foundation. The next part of it is we're installing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of foundations. We have to make sure those foundations are actually practical to install at that scale. I think that's where industry is lacking quite a bit.
Most people can do that first part. They can design a foundation, and they can even do some more tests and say, "Yeah, we're pretty confident it's going to work across the site." The soil probings, that's where we gain an entire other layer of data. You can see all those purple diamonds. We do these in a grid-type pattern every 250, 300 feet across the site. It tells you, did that foundation actually go in the ground as we expected it to? Or did it hit a refusal? Was it a high torque value? Was it a low torque value? What happened, basically, during the installation of it? We're not measuring any test, any capacity of it, just can it actually be deployed in the field, or is there going to be an issue?
A lot of people do not do that step, then they run into areas of the site where, "Yeah, it will hold, but we cannot get them to go in the ground." Or, "Yeah, we got them to go in the ground, but they basically fell in the ground in this area, now all of a sudden, we have to remediate those. We have to put concrete, or we have additional costs because we did not check that spot." Going through and doing both parts of it, both with the capacity test and the soil probing, can tell you, here is the best optimized foundation, here is the best method to install that foundation. We can zone that out into a nice zone map, which will tell you, based on color code, what the foundation should be.
Based on each one of those sites, usually they are broken out into different blocks. You can kind of see how you should install it. If it needs to be pre-drilled, if it can directly drive into the ground. Are there different things you need to consider? You can build that battle plan ahead of time and be prepared going into these projects, so you do not end up with surprises that are going to cost you money for rework, for change orders, for remediation. That is where the customers can see the value. They do this, they get the information, they know what is happening underneath the soil, and they can be prepared for it.
That is where, historically, they have lost so much of that money, and we are giving them that information to say, "Here is how you should build it right from the beginning." I am going to hand it back over to Josh, and he is going to wrap it up here for us.
All right. Thanks, Joe. On the last slides, there was one very important thing that we did forget, I forgot, and Joe forgot, the Atlas I and the Atlas II, all the above ground steel portions and the bearing are 45X eligible. Both those two products are 45X eligible. We will go through that a little bit later today, point out the product in the field and 45X eligibility. It is not the subsurface stuff, but above ground, those components are 45X eligible. All right, Kevin highlighted our strong performance and financial targets earlier today. Those are a testament to the value we create through better engineering and execution. Cost efficiency, APA and Array working together, we reduce system overdesign. Risk reduction, the APA on-site testing program, we can dramatically reduce project risk for our clients.
Capital efficiency, designing the project with the right foundation from the beginning, reduce refusal costs and project risk. Financial impact, better engineering ultimately improves project margins and predictability. What is next for APA's growth? The Atlas portfolio that we just launched two weeks ago, we are getting tremendous feedback from clients. Calls are coming in. Our sales team is really reaching out to clients. Those doors are opening up. Everybody is extremely interested in taking a look at the Atlas product. Lots of webinars. We actually have basically a line right now of clients that want to come to the APA sandbox and see the actual product and get a hands-on feel for installing these in real life. I think the client feedback on the product has been overwhelming, even a lot more than we were really expecting on it.
We are super excited for that Atlas portfolio of products that we recently launched. Further expansion in the utility scale solar industry. Right now, again, APA in the past, a lot of DG entering into that utility scale. We are building a lot of those relationships with those utility scale clients. A majority of them have not used APA's products in the past, so we still have the majority of them to prove our products to them and how well our products work. Once we can get through those doors, Array is really helping on that. They utilize our product. Hopefully, the trend will be just like the rest of our clients, repeat clients 100% of the time. Growth opportunities, expanding manufacturing capabilities into automation. Really talked about that earlier, and you will get to see it. Our 150,000 sq ft manufacturing facility has a lot of automation.
It has a lot of new equipment. It has a lot of new pieces of components that are very unique. Then opening up the door on the 130,000 sq ft manufacturing in Bryan, Ohio, which will have some really new CNC tube lasers and a new CNC bender that is very state of the art. Extending that foundation solution into other markets. Currently, today we do some wire management on our foundation systems. We are starting to do inverter skids on our foundation systems, and we are looking at quite a few large BESS projects. Those battery storage systems fit really well on our helical foundations and designing systems for that particular space. Expanding into existing product portfolios. If our products work this well in the United States., they are going to work really well all over the country. We have great solutions.
It is a matter of APA continuing to grow and entering into those space. Right now in North America, there is just so much opportunity right now. We are really focused in this space. A s soon as we get there, we can definitely expand into those international markets. Joe and I are very excited to host you guys today at our campus, our facility, show you our new sandbox that we recently put in ground. Everybody say a little prayer for no rain this afternoon, and we all stay dry because it will be a great experience if it is dry out there. All right. Appreciate it. Cool. Thanks, everyone. I think we are going to take a quick 10-minute break. Grab water, go to the restroom, anything you need to do. A fter that, we will turn it over to the rest of the team. Thanks.
Thank you.
All right, everybody. Thank you. Welcome back. Hopefully, you've enjoyed the materials so far. My name is Nick Strevel. I am our Chief Product Officer. I am here with Darin Green. We have been working together a long time, and we are pretty excited to talk about really bridging the gap between technology and the customer, and how we do that. I will let Darin start and walk us through our customer journey and our customer strategy, and then I will bring it through and help you understand how that works into our product strategy, our technical selling, and you guys can see how that all works together. Darin?
Thanks, Nick. A quick word on my background. I have had the privilege of serving as Array's Chief Revenue Officer since January of 2025, following more than 15 years in the renewable energy product and sales strategy, and another 10 years in energy and arbitrage trading. Over the past two decades together, Nick and I have built a symbiotic commercial and technical partnership, a collaborative approach that we have refined over time via deep industry zippering, built on passion, integrity, culture, and thought leadership. Let me start with the model that underpins everything Nick and I are about to walk through. What we want to share with you over the next several minutes is, frankly, one of the things we are most excited about here at Array. It is the clearest evidence we have that our strategy is starting to take hold. Here is the thesis in one line.
We have and we continue to build differentiated products supported by an innovation that drives real value for customers. When we drive value for customers, that translates into long-term shareholder value. It starts with discovery. We begin with field realities, customer economics, and execution risk, not just what is easiest for us to build. From there, we focus on innovation, translating pain points into interoperable engineering, foundation, and tracker solutions. This is exactly why the APA acquisition matters, as does AWM. Trackers, foundations, and the balance of plant as one integrated, connected system, not separate products from the same vendor. That leads to differentiation, site optimization, faster installation, reduced logistics and a more efficient use of materials on every project, not just the flagship ones. It is how we solve critical customer challenges with patented products, real IP, not just a marketing claim.
That is profitable, a nd all of that, e xcuse me, a ll of that converts to value capture, a greater share of project economics, a lower cost structure, and margin expansion. That is profitable growth, higher returns, and a stronger competitive advantage. It is not just our own math. It is validated and backed by third-party engineering. When we make a claim like this, it has been independently tested. Put it all together, and that is how innovation and differentiation drive shareholder value. That is the model, and it is exactly what Nick will highlight with specific product examples. With that, I will turn it over to Nick, who will walk you through our journey.
All right. Thanks. We are going to talk through a bunch of different things here over the next few minutes, and I think there will be some concepts that are really meaningful to the selection of this technology and the things that we have developed, the things that we have patented, the things that are core to what Array has been and will be as a company. We think about the changing and evolving sites. Joe and Josh talked to you about that a lot. They talked about the geotechnical engineering, the boring. I think it said boring five times on that slide, to be clear. There is a joke about that, but we have to do the testing. We have to build those foundations into it, understand the differences.
A lot of people do not recognize this, but the tracker really is that core element of the engineering of the project.
The modules sit on it. All the forces that go into those structures are required to be engineered by the tracker, and then the balance of system hangs on it or is attached to it. It is that central element of what is going on there. We think about the below ground, as we talked about. Array thinks a lot about the stuff that is above ground. I will point to you a couple things that are important about our technology that are even more important as we think about what is going on today. Our torque tube is different. We do not drill the torque tube. We do not pre-drill the torque tube. T hat has been a nice feature for us, and I will tell you a couple reasons why. One is that it is easier to put the mounts and attachments on the field.
You have some field flexibility there.
Number two, from a retrofit perspective, a repowering perspective, Array trackers, I believe, are much more conducive to a repower situation where you do not have all that pre-integer setup for modules. The last one is what is going on today, is that there is a lot of trade and policy things that are affecting modules, making late stage decisions on that. Having been able to order your tracker components with potential flexibility around that makes a big difference to our customers. We think about installation. You will see today out in the field our FASTMount system. Joe and Josh talked about fasteners. Installers do not like them. They are important. However, if we can eliminate them, and one of the reasons they do not like them is because of that torquing, where you have to check it was the right amount of force onto that fastener.
We have to check it, double check it, sometimes triple check it. We have developed solutions that eliminate that with our FASTMount EasyClip solution you will see in the market at our showcase. We have really considered as well the operational considerations of projects. We think about energy production. We do not just think about the tracker as parts and pieces, nuts and bolts. We think about it as the key element that drives energy production, and we think about it from a risk protection perspective as well. A lot of weight has been put on the tracker, and I think we have come up with innovative solutions to the industry's problems of extreme weather, whether that is building projects in extreme windy conditions, and we will talk to you about our Wind XP technology, but also around hail.
Building projects in the Hail Belt is a reality, and having tracker solutions both on the hardware and the software side to manage that is something that I think we're doing very well. Our platform has expanded over time and it's really starting to, as Kevin mentioned and others, it's really starting to grow quite quickly. Because of that innovation, because of that collaboration, we're bringing to market the best ideas that we have, a collection of our best thoughts and our engineers' capabilities as well, combined with our customers' recommendations and feedback. We have over 100 gigawatts of trackers installed. The DuraTrack platform is that long trusted, tried and true system. You'll see that today. What we're doing is expanding on that platform, on that trusted platform, not starting over. You could see a few variants here of DuraTrack, the OmniTrack, which is terrain-following.
Not only do we have a nice terrain-following solution, we just launched an addition, an upgrade to that to have OmniTrack 2.0. It's additional engineering. It's additional understanding that saves our customers money. It doesn't cost more to build OmniTrack 2.0 than OmniTrack 1.0, and it provides additional flexibility. What that means is that you can have less cut and fill, where you take dirt from one place and move it to another place on the project site because you're trying to balance out those foundation heights. It also means that you can go across different terrains, right? Those sites we talked about. The hail, really important. We'll talk more about that, and I'll talk about our hail technology, but we now have multiple variants to really fill in the gaps of what hail risk is driving into those systems. Y ou have multiple hail zones across.
This is a predominantly a North America phenomena, and in the United States here. There's multiple zones where you have extreme risk, and you may need to go to a very steep angle to reduce that cross-section where the high energy, the large hail balls, can strike the solar modules, potentially break them or cause cell cracking, a bunch of other things that are not desirable. The tracker can go steeper, but to go steeper, you generally have to go a little higher. That introduces some cost. O ptimizing the amount of angle to what the risk profile is is really important. T hat's why we have our HAIL-XP at the steep angle. We have a 60 degree we just announced. We developed that very quickly with our customers. They asked us, "Can you do this?" We thought about it.
We said, well, we want to build in all of our tried-and-true technology around our wind stow and the AC power that reliably gets it to stow. We launched it to market coincident with our insurance forum this year. SkyLink. In areas where you have difficult soils to do trenching in, we have a solution that's DC powered from the sun, also with no batteries. W e have two main systems, an AC powered system that's connected. It's powered directly from an auxiliary transformer on the inverter pad, which connects directly to the flow of electricity into the substation, connected to the large utility grids that the utility sale projects are interconnected to. Those are high reliable connections. Those transmission lines don't go down in a thunderstorm.
That is very important when we think about hail resilience in terms of not just having a steep tracker, but getting there. Getting there every time. The concept of reliability of stow is something that the industry is really starting to clue in on, and not counting on a battery that could have been discharged or not properly maintained or not changed frequently enough over the project's life cycle when the hail storm comes at night, when there is no sunlight to power your tracker. Ours is powered by that reliable grid. Kevin mentioned a number of product launches. You have seen and heard about a few of those already, and you are going to see them today out in the field.
These really, I think, complement and are showing that the innovation is targeting specific areas of the market that drive additional growth for us and fill gaps where customers are looking for that optimized or even sub-optimized product lines. Also what you will see is that we are using a family of components. We are not driving in a bunch of complexity into our business. We are standardizing it, and that was one of the big things around the DuraTrack D2S product. W e had our legacy STI H250 product that we have been selling internationally for quite some time. We looked at how can we bring our technology feature set that our customers like, OmniTrack, terrain-following, as well as the passive stow technology, there will be more on that, do not worry, to our international markets.
Two big things that customers, it saves them money or delivers on project returns.
We did it in a smart way of bringing similar components to those international markets. N ow we have a streamlined supply chain for global technology, not bifurcated across different market sets. I talked about OmniTrack 2.0. It really, really helps. This is just straight feedback and a great way to give back to those that are installing out there and make that civil engineering cost go down. R eally exciting here on this product suite, but what I really want you to take away from this is to see these are variants and they solve customer challenges, but they are made with essentially the same family of components and the same technology core elements of our innovation that provide bankability and long-term performance. I t is not just the hardware.
Our in-house engineers have developed some of the most innovative solutions to increase project yields, reduce commissioning risk, and deliver long-term extreme weather risk reductions that enable lower premiums and deductibles. I will talk to you about two of the energy performance elements of our software technology, backtracking and diffuse. F or silicon modules, they are arranged with an arrangement of individual solar cells on a module. I think everybody hopefully knows this. However, when a tracker system is in the morning and the evening, they are casting a shadow upon adjacent rows. You would not spread them out infinitely wide because then your land utilization would be a problem. Y ou have to accept some amount of shading in the morning and the evening, and the project economics drive that optimization.
When you cast a shadow across silicon cells, the output of the module doesn't reflect proportionally to that shadow, therefore a disproportionately small shadow can increase the losses on that module to the effect where you want to avoid that. That's what backtracking technology does. These shadows aren't just caused by the horizon and the simple adjacent structures. They also happen and need to be optimized for the topology of the site. We talked about not disturbing the soils. We talked about having products that can go over in undulating terrain. We have the technology to optimize those morning and evening shading conditions. These are upgrades to our products. These are software upgrades that our customers pay for. They drive value, they have bankability associated with them, and they build them right into their pro formas. They're in the energy prediction models.
They all can measure this correctly, and they're starting to gain a lot of traction. We see this as a great way to bring more value to our customers and also experience a nice profitable area for our company to grow into. Diffuse is a little bit different. The backtracking takes into account where we know where the sun and the solar modules and the Earth are at any given time. Diffuse is something that's a little bit more subject to change. Diffuse stow technology is based on the phenomena that clouds, on cloudy days, the sunlight is scattered. It's not coming as a direct beam from the sun where you just simply say the easy question is, what's the best place to point the solar panel? Well, at the sun, right? That's the obvious answer to that question.
The reality is, on cloudy days, the best place and sometimes to point the solar panel is not at the sun, but it may be flat to harvest more of that diffuse reflected light, the scattered light in the atmosphere, and we're constantly monitoring with these software technologies. We're monitoring the proportion of diffuse light of the solar resource, and we're making decisions for the plant to go to a diffuse stow condition, but also potentially looking at what is the frequency of those clouds. We're not just quickly going back and forth, doing things like that. That would be very disruptive to performance. We're looking at, is it going to be a cloudy day? It looks like it's very cloudy. Now we can get into a diffuse condition and harvest more light. These things aren't enormous amounts of energy. They're in the low single-digit percentages.
However, those low single-digit percentages make a big difference on a project pro forma. Just a couple stats on this. We're at, this year, about a 50% attach rate on those energy software technologies. 2026 deliveries are already above, so this year so far on this, are already above the entirety of last year. G aining momentum, and I think it's pretty obvious that pretty much every project can benefit from these technologies. One other key point on these is that we got 100 gigawatts of stuff, over 100 gigawatts of trackers installed. Over half of that is available to be upgraded to this. T hat's a legacy pipeline that we can go back, talk to those customers, show them those benefits, and then create a revenue stream from projects that we may have sold many years in the past.
Moving on to the extreme weather portion of the software portfolio, this is another area where bringing these tools, combined with the hardware, is really creating that interoperable solution that we have talked about. It is not just saying, I see a hailstorm coming in. Let us stow my tracker. There is a lot of ways that folks have tried to do that. We have a completely autonomous patented solution for this, where a weather signal is inputted into our system from weather data sources, which describes the probability, the size, the direction, et cetera, of the pending hailstorm. That comes into the automated hail stow response system, and then without any human intervention, the tracker is preemptively put into a stow condition. Because of our Wind XP capabilities, we are able to take the strength in both directions, either front-winded or back-winded of our tracker.
We can store into the best situation where you have the least amount of either hail falling from the sky or potentially wind-driven hail that can also be a severe problem. Getting to stow really matters. I talked about this before. Here is the data point. We look at the information coming back from those project sites, and we are seeing a greater than 99% of getting to stow on a hail signal input. You also got to be able to get there quickly, and the way our system is built, customers really understand this is the right solution for this problem set. Finally, on software, we are trying to make things easier and faster. We know installers want to get off the site. They want to commission the project quickly.
We developed a simple smartphone app that allows them to commission those trackers and controllers and build in those capabilities there for the software tools. What is important about this one as well is not just that, hey, you can do it quickly with a smartphone. It goes back to our architecture. With our DuraTrack and OmniTrack technology, the amount of tracker controllers and drive systems out there could be up to 30 times less than our competitors. That is 30 times less going there, optimizing a controller, doing all that work. We think it is wasted time on the project and it is wasted cost. Our system is connected mechanically. It is a robust system, and it really provides for a great long-term performance model on the O&M basis of the system. Okay.
How do we translate some of those things, benefits to our customers, and we are going to talk to you about how we do this, what is the technical sales function, what is the core element of that, and then also a couple of the key things that are really resonating with our customer base. One is our Wind XP patented passive stow technology, as well is a simple fact of how we designed our product a long time ago that is really creating some design flexibility and some benefits for project sites today, which is an efficiency element of our tracker system. Technical sales are near and dear to my heart. I have been doing it a long time. I strongly believe that having those crossover people, that crossover skill in that business development process is really important. These are technical products. They are sold to engineers.
They need to understand what's going on. We need to understand our customers, right? We have two areas where we focus on this to really drive value. The first is the developer, IPP, utility persona, and the other is the EPC. They have different motivations for what they're looking for and what's important to them and why they make technology choices and decisions, and we really think about the right communication to have to those different parties. Firstly, on the developers, what we've done to really change the communication around this topic is to understand what they do. We've built the same project finance models that they have. We use the same contemporary project finance sensitivities in our models. We stay up to date on the PPA trends. What's the price of energy? You need to know all of these things.
You need to know the price of labor. You need to know the price of land. Pretty much every single element that goes into a customer's development plan for their project early on, we've built our own models on that, and then we could integrate into that model some of the sensitivities that the tracker system and the technology that we offer brings to that. That really helps sell our technology. It really helps them understand the difference that not all of these trackers are the same. While we bring a competitive offering to the market, we're also really bringing a differentiated one at the same time. We've done a lot of work to change our culture on that.
We've done training internally to educate our leaders and the rest of our associates to understand this and to really understand how our customers think and build that into the way we present our products and our features. For the installers, we really think about ease of construction, pre-kitting, fast pace, reducing nuts and bolts, thinking about product innovations that drive that. We also understand commissioning is important. Commissioning tests. If you have a higher performing tracker, less things to commission, something that has less errors and things of that nature, their ability to pass their capacity test, do their commissioning, and move on to the next project is going to be benefited by our technology, and we're innovating in that space as well. When we think about all these areas, we look for a balance.
We look for a balance, and this is our design philosophy, is how do we balance performance and energy, and I'll talk to you a little bit more about that in a moment. How do we balance project returns for our customers, reliability, and resilience, right? We don't just add more stuff that's at an unoptimized way, just making things thicker, heavier. You have to do it in an optimized way. Thinking about simple design philosophies, building intellectual property around that, and then illustrating the value of it with the right people having those conversations really makes a difference in who we sell to and I think why they buy our products. We have to balance all of that with cost, right? That's why we look for not only ways just through supply chains, et cetera, component standardization to save cost, but also through innovation.
That's exciting about the foundation addition to our business. One of the things that wasn't mentioned is that having a two-part foundation allows you to optimize something that is essentially impossible to optimize on a single pile, which is the corrosive coatings, the galvanization coatings on piles. When a standard pile is dipped, you don't dip the portion that's in the ground differently than it's in the top. W hat that generally means is you're putting a lot of excess material where you don't need it. We're able to optimize that between the top and the part that's above ground. The corrosive environment above ground and in the ground are quite different. O ptimizing those coatings for that application makes a lot of sense and is a way to save cost.
We're looking for those areas, those pockets of opportunity, those white spaces in this business to drive that really helpful thing for our customer. Okay. C heck this out. All trackers have to deal with wind, and it's the biggest challenge associated with what we do. The solar modules on there effectively act like a big sail, and they're getting bigger and bigger all the time. We're seeing that trend in the industry. W e have to manage through that.
One of the things that we have to manage through is not just the strength at the highest wind condition, but also a circumstance which is called torsional divergence, which essentially means that when you're at different angles, particularly ones that are in that middle of the day angles, the wind can pass through the project and get to the point where even at medium wind speeds, the currents, the vortices that are formed in those winds, can actually drive the tracker system into an unstable condition. A ll tracker manufacturers are aware of this condition, and they've come up with different ways and approaches to solve that problem. However, I'll bucket those into two buckets. The way Array does it, and the way everybody else has done it.
The way we did it was through a mechanical system, and a mechanical system that doesn't rely upon sensors, electronics, or even the motor of the tracker to articulate away from the unsafe angle. We rely upon a system where when the tracker experiences a torque that is in excess of a friction clutch that we have, it automatically, mechanically, instantaneously rotates to its safe stow position, and that allows only the rows for which experience a concerning wind speed to go into a stow condition. Alternatively, the way the field does this is that they're looking at. No one knows when that gust of wind is going to happen, and trackers don't articulate with their motor and drive systems instantaneously.
To solve that problem, generally, the way it is done is that you are looking at wind speeds around the site, you are looking at gust coefficients, and when those experience a certain threshold, you put the whole site to safe stow, because you cannot tell, you do not know if that gust is going to come down and swoop in through the middle, coming from this side or that side. You probably got an idea, but you cannot bank on it. You cannot put the tracker and the modules and the whole project at risk for that.
What that means is, generally, when we add up all of those losses of the site being put at stow versus only the few rows that actually need to be at stow, if you add those losses up, that is what this map is showing, is that that turns into a specific yield benefit for our mechanical passive stow system, up to about 4% in areas. Also interestingly, I will point out on the map, is that this is not concentrated in the highest wind areas, the Gulf, Florida, et cetera. It is concentrated in areas where the probability of medium sustained winds are higher, and those winds are where the tracker is going to stow in the daytime when the sun is shining. When your tracker is not pointed at the sun, it is not doing its job.
Our system is really only when these wind conditions happen, a very small percentage of the site, 2% or less, are going to stow under the same conditions where our competitors put most or all of their site into stow condition. That difference is 98% of the site is still tracking. It is protected by the ones that have experienced that. You have to preemptively go to stow, whether it is wind or hail. However, unless you have something that can instantaneously respond, which is what we have. This is a patented technology that Array has. We built it not only into our DuraTrack gear drive clutch system, but we have also integrated into a slewing drive system that we use in our D2S solution. I talked about those LCOE models, 4% energy.
If you look at a general average, to put some numbers to this, a general average PPA price around the country in those areas there, you could be looking at a sensitivity about a penny and a half of NPV, a penny and a half per watt of NPV for every percent of specific yield gained on a utility scale PV project site. You can do the math. This could be a large portion of the entire value of product that we are selling. Our customers are starting to understand this, and Darin Green will talk to you about what they are saying, actually. I will show you a quick video on this. This is in Colorado, so keep your eyes on these two trackers. This is how the system operates.
This is an area where we consistently see 50, 60 mile an hour winds quite frequently, and the air rushes through these valleys. That tracker just went to stow, and this isn't sped up or anything. It just happens automatically. There's no motors or drives that did that. It experienced a limit on its torque, and it immediately, without any human intervention, without any technology intervention, without a sensor that could fail or an anemometer that's not giving the right signal, it just went to a safe position and is protecting the row next to it. The wind didn't change. It's still coming across that, and that flat area is where those trackers can experience those harmonics, and that can have that torsional divergence. It's pretty interesting to watch this happen in real time. It's hard to catch it in the field because I showed the numbers.
They're low single digits. We have good cameras out here, and we catch that. The last one I want to talk about is also, I think, something near and dear to both developers and EPCs. This is our table density benefit. You'll see it at the site. It's very simple. The way we designed our system from a long time ago is that the modules go across the bearings. That means that from the drive line to the end of the row, there's no module gaps that are built into the structure. That's wasted torque tube. That's wasted land. That's wasted space. Module companies work really hard to improve the efficiency of their semiconductors. They spend billions and billions of dollars to do that.
To give it up by just creating these large gaps on the tracker, really, I don't think is providing service to what the industry is looking for. I'll talk about what that means, but basically what you can see here is that by compressing those modules on the site, and this is across the product line of our DuraTrack and OmniTrack products, we get about 5% more power density on the system. What does that mean, 5% more density? Well, it allows you to do a couple different things. You can take that density just straight off the top and add more capacity on the same land. We understand the fixed costs of solar project development. You have fixed costs, you have a set of land, a set of boundaries. If you could put more capacity through that, the project economics get better.
You could also take the same capacity of modules, equipment, of the DC capacity of the system, and spread it out a little bit. Remember I talked about that shadow optimization that's required on every system, where you're going to have to accept some shading from adjacent rows? Well, if you have more capacity or more efficiency, and you use the same land, you could spread out the trackers a little bit and provide more energy because there's less shading. That could be up to 1% additional specific yield. V is-a-vis 1.5 cents a watt of net present value by doing that, by using the same land. The second two are less intuitive, but they really matter to building sites.
If you have a more energy dense, a more capacity dense system, when we look at site plans of our competitors versus ours, we see a lot more different SKUs and row lengths and all sorts of variability. Every single one of those is building something different. The installers have to get the right parts and pieces. They hate looking for stuff on the project site. I have heard them say it many, many times. We can do the same capacity with fewer SKUs on the site. Also, the last one here that is pretty interesting is that with the same land, and Joe talked very clearly about this, is that even intra the project, you have varying conditions underground, potential moving of dirt, et cetera. You could avoid some of those areas. Those are the costliest areas to build, and that minimizes civil engineering.
I am going to turn it back over to Darin to let him talk to you about what the customers are saying about this stuff and how this technical sales, the value discussion, building it into our customers' models, is really creating measurable results for our business.
Thanks, Nick.
Yep.
That is a bird's eye view of our tech, and here is how that translates into the market, and this is where it gets exciting. Two real proof points from two of the most sophisticated buyers in the market. The first, starting from the bottom, was a 1.4 gigawatt OmniTrack solar plus storage single project at a high wind site for a tier 1 IPP. In their words, maximizing energy in a high wind environment was a key selection criteria, and Array's patented Wind XP technology was a compelling solution that minimized their stow losses and enhanced their project finance model. The second is our DuraTrack 60° variant that Nick described earlier. I want to talk through this one a little differently because it is less about a single project and it is more about how we build products. This variant came directly out of our voice of customer process.
A customer need fed directly into our roadmap, and we enhanced the product and met it. The near-term opportunity, this single enhancement should unlock gigawatts of pipeline on an annual basis in hail-prone region. That's not hypothetical. That's a real market opening directly tied to listening to our customers. The bigger story is what it represents. We're bringing customers closer to our innovation process, and that's compounding into real market share gains. Customers increasingly see Array as the partner who builds products with them, not just a vendor who they buy from. That's a hard thing to replicate, and it's a growing part of our competitive mode. Two of the most demanding buyers in the market, two real-time problems, two real-time solutions, and a growing pipeline of customers who trust us enough to not only brainstorm and build with us, and it's not anecdotal.
Let me show you what this looks like at scale. This is the slide I'm most excited to talk to you about because it shows you where the strategy meets the actual results. Differentiated innovation is translating into measurable customer adoption and growth right now, not someday or in the future. Look at this trajectory. Our order book has climbed every single quarter from $1.8 billion in Q2 2025 to our record $2.5 billion that we recently announced. As Kevin mentioned, that's 37% growth year-over-year, and this growth has real staying power behind it. Customers are actively diversifying their supply base. As older long-term frameworks start to roll off, there are only a handful of qualified suppliers to choose from, and we're winning back share across the board. Here's the one that should really get your attention.
As Nick mentioned, Array's software revenue is growing at more than 100% year-over-year. Just let that sit for a second. This is the platform Nick and I have been building towards and scaling faster than almost anything in our portfolio. The runway behind that is pretty significant. As Nick mentioned, we have a captive pipeline of over 50 gigawatts on the software side alone, which is exactly why we expect this growth to keep compounding. It's not legacy products that are carrying this. New introductions like OmniTrack, SkyLink, Hail-XP, and now the full suite of APA products already make up roughly 50% of our order book. That's our innovation engine driving half of everything we're winning, and we're just getting warmed up here. That's the proof at the company level. Now let me zoom out a bit and tell you where this puts us.
This is the slide that ties everything together, because it's not just about winning individual deals, it's about how we position our platform long term. We're no longer seen as just a pure-play tracker company. We're viewed as a broader integrated solutions platform spanning trackers, foundations, software, and services. That's a very different conversation than we've had a few years back. We're applying customer-specific engineering solutions earlier in the project lifecycle to drive differentiated technical advantages, which is exactly what you saw on the DuraTrack 60° variant a minute ago. Our transparent LCOE-focused strategy is unlocking considerable value for our customers, earning us a seat at the table earlier, and a higher-quality conversation at that. As important, we're building AI-enabled products and processes with a heavy focus on design-from-automation lens that improves speed and consistency today. We expect this to only widen our differentiation going forward.
Put simply, Array and APA are building an interoperable platform designed to improve overall project economics and deepen customer intimacy. That is the thesis Nick and I opened with, and that is what you have just seen show up in the numbers. Now before I hand it back, I want to leave you with one more thought. Our president, Neil Manning, recently recommended a great book called "The Killer Angels," which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Highly recommend it. It is set during the Civil War, and the striking part is not the military strategy or the artillery deployments, but account after account, the unwavering belief of the soldier that they could win was what really made the difference in these accounts.
Now, that is precisely the culture we are building here at Array, hiring people with the passion and drive to believe we can overcome whatever is in front of us.
That mindset is what makes work fun, and to be honest, that enables the art of the possible. W ith that, I will hand it back to Kevin to bring us home. Thank you.
Thank you, guys.
Great. Well, hopefully, you are getting a sense of why we are so excited about the future of Array as we move forward. I think I will leave you with a couple of messages. The first is Array is incredibly well-positioned to participate in this high-growth solar market as we move forward. Second, we have an incredible amount of momentum as we are driving forward our innovation, our customer engagement, and we are doing that with differentiated technology. H onestly, while the presentations were very good this morning, I cannot wait for you to see this live in the field this afternoon. You will see that, and I promise you will walk away with a different perspective. Third, we are going to continue to expand our platform. We are not done.
We are gaining share, scaling our footprint, and yet we have a lot of opportunity additionally in some of the international markets.
Fourth, as we are doing this, we are doing this with a mind to create longer-term shareholder value, disciplined cost structure, margin expansion initiatives through new product development and supply chain, strong cash flow generation, and a balanced capital allocation view where our priorities are intended to support both our long-term growth, our near-term investments, and obviously long-term returns. A gain, we have presented a lot to you today. Remember some of those key talking points. You will see it live and in action in a couple of hours. W ith that, let me invite Neil, Keith, and Sarah to join me on stage to answer any questions you may have about what you heard today or about our business Array. Come on up, guys.
All right, everyone. We're going to now move into our Q&A portion of the day. Joining me on stage, as Kevin mentioned, Kevin, our CEO, Neil, our President and COO, and Keith, our CFO. Then we also have our other presenters from today available here in the front row for questions. F or the next 30 minutes, we're going to take questions from the room and online from the webcast. I just have a few quick notes before we start. In the room, if you have a question, please raise your hand and wait for a microphone. For the benefit of our webcast audience, we want to make sure that we have everything on mic. Online, you have the appropriate space to also ask questions. When you're called on, please state your name and the firm you're with before asking your questions in the room.
With that, we'll get started. Who has the first question?
Good morning. Vikram Bagri, Citi. Thanks for having us here and walking us through the new and improved Array. One of the themes that came out very clearly is that the innovation cycle has shortened a lot. You have launched five products in the last one year. There is a lot more focus on innovation. Could you talk about how you are collecting voice of the customer, as you highlighted in the presentation. Are you hosting more events? Are you hosting more EPCs at the site? How is that feedback channeled through the company, and how do you handle that feedback? How does it go into different departments? You have a lot more talent at the company from Affordable Wire Management and APA. How do they come together and help shorten that innovation cycle? Thank you.
Yeah, that is a great question. About three years ago, we began this program that we call Array Days . The genesis of that was me going out and meeting a lot of my customers and finding that at that point, our sales team were doing a good job calling on purchasing departments, if you will, of a lot of the large developers. W e were missing the finance teams, we were missing the engineering teams, and we were not engaging enough at that level. W e had this view we could do a couple of things. One is that we can do a matrix of all our innovation and new products and all the departments of all the customers and spend time having every time a salesperson goes out, check that box and make this color-coded kind of cool thing.
We said, "Well, that is going to take a long time. Let us do it differently. Let us start bringing all our customers in for days at a time, and we are going to spend three days at a time with the finance team members, with the engineers of those customers, and with the purchasing departments. W e are going to not only in one direction show them all our innovation, but a huge portion of those meetings that we call Array Days, was all about getting their voice of customer." O ne of the things that you have to do when you come to an Array Days, is to spend a couple of hours in a room on the value stream of what we do. Everything from identification of customer to collection of cash, which means how do we think about warranty service between us?
How do we project manage between us?
Frankly, we ask them who is best in class in each one of those categories and why. I t goes beyond product. It was warranty service. Array, when I have a warranty issue, you are harder to do business with. Some of your competitors will just, yeah, send me the replacement parts. They do not worry about it. You guys want us to fill out forms and do things like that. T hat is just an example of the feedback we got. Array, you guys have to do better on our quarterly business reviews. Your competitor has an engineer assigned to every review such that if there is a technical question, you do not have to get back to us in 24 hours. It is answered on the call live. We said, "Okay, we can learn from that."
That was the beginning of our really intensely mapped out voice of customer.
Now we've had those Array Days, we have three or four a year for the last three or four years, and if you come down to our AIC, you'll see this map on the wall of every one of those steps, and we're not ashamed. We think sunlight is the best disinfectant. I like to say that around the office. We have good and bad in every one of those areas, what the customer comments were, who in my organization is responsible for fixing it, and by when. Some of them are pretty easy. To assign an engineer to every quarterly business review, that's easy to do. Others maybe take a little bit longer. We began that journey about three years ago of continually moving the needle and improving the customer experience that our customers have. We also focus heavily on those meetings about our innovation.
We used to take the approach, frankly, of we'll develop it super secret, then throw it over the wall to the customers and say, "What do you guys think of what we just did? Huh? Come on, buy into it, like it." We don't do that anymore. We bring customers in and we develop, and before we launch something here, before we tell the market we've done something, that has been in the field working with customers for some time. Yes, we have some of the new APA products already been in the field being tested and collecting feedback before we launch it. SkyLink was out in the field far before we told the market about it, collecting real data from real sites with partner customers that may say, "Hey, Kevin, we're going to build this 500 gigawatt site over here.
What do you need?" Hey, look, I just need two gigawatts for my new product. Just give me a few lanes. Let's test that, keep it private, and let us keep coming to the site and test it. That stuff is really working. We're engaging our customers. We're getting their feedback more. In fact, one of the key elements of building the AIC was to have an entire new customer center where we can host lots of customers at any one time with product on the floor that we could share and walk around, feel, and touch, much like you're seeing this afternoon. I t's been a lot of effort going in to collect better VoC, but we also had to demonstrate to our customers that we were willing to respond to the feedback they were giving us. Right? No institutionalized arrogance. You tell us, change happens immediately.
That was really about driving execution through the organization. G reat question. Yeah, Colin.
Colin Rusch. Colin Rusch from Oppenheimer. Thanks, guys. With the incremental shift in the business strategy, the incremental offerings, and the legacy contracts rolling off here, can you talk a little bit about the evolving pricing strategy and how we should think about margins progressing here as you see some of those legacy contracts roll off, and you see the monetization of these newer capabilities?
Yeah. That's a great question. I think the way I look at this is look, we talked about that word, the B word, the bundling word, right? That's not our approach. You've heard me say on our public calls, we are not about fries with that shake. We are about saying, "Listen, when you see these products this afternoon, you will instantly understand the amount of labor savings we're driving for our customers in the field, the amount of certainty we're giving them about execution." When you think of things like the APA and the subsurface, I know you analysts follow a lot of others in the industry, and you've seen others in the industry this year have really difficult times underestimating subsurface conditions in the marketplace, right? That have cost literally billions of dollars of market capitalization out there. These are the things we're doing.
We understand that value. We don't give those services away for free at all. We understand the value as a developer of not having subsurface issues creep up and surprise you more broadly, right? W e charge more. We make sure that you understand the value in that. We make sure that the product, be it an engineering service or an actual product, is incredibly well done. W hen you get to see APA later today and understand their engineering services team, as they described it in the precedent, this is not a fly-by-night, "Hey, quick, we think that's going to be good enough." This is an incredible depth of comfort we're giving our customers in terms of we know these foundations are going to work and your project is going to be successful. Very different than others.
As it relates to pricing and margins, look, we've continued to say that we are comfortable that Array over time will return to those high 20s, low 30s margins, and we're doing that through these things we're talking about. One, certainly with Neil and management of our supply chain, and continually improving our supply chain. Number two, these new products. We tend to not launch products that are dilutive in margin to the ones they're replacing. Everything we're doing is about capturing more margin, better price capture, right? T hat we know that that will lend to more margins. As we built this portfolio, it's also about using portfolio strategy to bring in products that we think are accretive margin. You see that play out very well with AWM as we've started disclosing some of the financial numbers there.
All of this is how we're going to build a higher quality portfolio with higher margins, as well as making sure that the technical sales team is selling the value to the customers. Yes, when I first came in four years ago, all this was an EPC price war, right? We're dealing with an EPC. It's all about price. As we're now going to the utilities, that 4% higher energy generation really matters to a utility. It really matters to an asset owner who's going to build that asset and keep it. Does it matter to an asset owner that's an asset flipper? No. They want the cheapest CapEx. They want to build this thing. Hey, if the warranty is three years, they're going to flip it in year two, right? We had to segment our customers and say which ones we want to do more business with.
Where does our value proposition really matter? Let's reorient the sales team to start selling more there. That's when we talk to you about the quality of our order book and the fact that 50% now is direct to utilities and direct to the kind of the developer non-flippers, if you think of it that way. That's what's really powerful, because then we're not in a price discussion down at an EPC level. We may still get a purchase order from the EPC, but that EPC is now directed to buy from Array from the ultimate owner, and those are the things driving positive margin improvement in our business.
Can I get just a follow-up here around capital allocation?
Yes, sir.
You mentioned in the presentation the preferred and retiring that, and you have had some success with acquisitions and integrating those. Can you just talk about the framework that you work with internally to make those capital allocation decisions and how we should think about the cash generation and where that ends up over the next two to three years?
Sure.
Thank you. Thank you, Colin. Good question. Internally, can you guys hear me?
Yeah.
Good. Look, internally, we are focused on two things when we think about capital allocation. First, cash generation, and we make sure that we have good free cash flow conversion. Thank you.
I think that microphone has seen better days.
Thank you. First we think about free cash flow conversion. How much of our earned EBITDA are we converting each year? W e think about what are the things in front of us that we have to do, and first, we have to make sure that we are reinvesting in our business for sustainability. CapEx, expansion, and so forth. W e think about making sure that we have the right level of flexibility in the capital structure, right? As we think about how do we deal with debt, how we deal with the upcoming maturities for the converts, how we think about the pref. I t's really about what's the best return for the company. What's the best return along the spectrum of things that we are faced with?
Of course, we continue to look across what are the opportunities we have for M&A, because of course, we are building out the Balance-as-a-System strategy. W hen we look across the things that we are faced with, we think about liquidity, we think about returns, we think about ensuring that we have the flexibility to operate the business. T hat's kind of the lens we're looking through each year.
I think if I could just add on some more specificity in that. I think when we think about the pref going cash pay now, right? Look, we'll do a little bit more in providing some clarity to you guys and to our shareholders in terms of how we feel about that. F irst of all, we've talked in some of the Q&A post-earnings about the fact that that's circa $11 million-$12 million this year, not an issue. You start with the six and a quarter paper that we have in the pref. That is an incredibly good piece of paper today. There's nothing we can do to go out and replace that in kind today as good.
Now, we're mindful that that does step up over coming years. What we're constantly working on is the conflicts of interest rates, discounts that we may be able to achieve. The M&A strategy. How's our free cash flow? We have particular ranges that we expect to stay below in terms of the pref as a percentage of free cash flow. We're very comfortable, as we have our backlog, as you see our improving profitability as a business. We're very, very comfortable with our cash flow generation and the ability to service that pref as we move forward without limiting our decisions in terms of some of the other areas of driving organic growth or even continuing our M&A strategy.
If you guys simply do the math and you look at our free cash flow, you will very quickly get to a point where you're not worried either, to be clear.
Hey, Mike Nolte from Deutsche Bank. Thanks for taking the question. You showed a lot of great products today, some of which were developed internally and some of which were through M&A. Looking forward, how do you see your balanced systems evolving? Do you plan on doing that internally or through external M&A? How do you weigh those decisions? Thank you.
That's an excellent question. To be clear, we don't have a philosophy that everything has to be invented here at Array. As such, what we didn't spend a lot of time on today is the work that our team under Nick is working on where we have partners. We are working very, very closely with partners on automation, for example. Not one partner on automation, but four partners on automation. We don't think we have to do everything internally. We think as we recognize the ecosystem, we're forming more partnerships with other companies, and there are things that we can continue to do to alter our products to make their products better. While we talked about that interoperability here with APA and AWM, to be clear, we started both of those journeys before we started talking about acquisition of either company.
We began working together on what we could do in the ecosystem to strengthen both of our products, and then it became obvious that we are stronger together than separate. We continue to work with other partners out in the ecosystem. Key focus is obviously on wire, key focus is on automation. Key focus is on how we play a bigger role in battery storage. All of those things we can do with partners. We do not have to do it alone. I think one of the interesting things that has happened is as the industry has become more driven towards some consolidation of some of these things, look, Array becomes a really attractive partner.
As one of our competitors goes and buys XYZ company, every other company in that space looks and says, "Oh, I should reach out to Array then." The amount of inbound partner requests we are getting now is just one of the more exciting things that Dr. Aaron Gabelnick, our head of M&A, and I are spending a disproportionate amount of our time, are just fielding the inbound numbers of people in that ecosystem that want to work closer with Array and see what we are building. It is really getting exciting, but we do not have to do everything internally. We will still do a lot internally because we believe innovation is at the core of who we are, but we are also beginning to partner with a lot of other ecosystem partners at this point.
Thanks. Chris Dendrinos with RBC. Just going back to the opportunity with APA, I am just curious how you all are thinking about the potential, call it attach rates for that foundation system over time. What are the core drivers behind that attach rate increasing? Then maybe just, I think you laid out a bit of an outlook for the revs there, but what would drive that above expectations and then below expectations? Thanks.
There are two things we think about. The first is the attach rate and increasing that penetration. What is going to drive that is the fact that those beautiful postage stamp, nice Arizona, Southern California, those solar sites are gone. Now we are doing Upper Midwest, we are doing Louisiana, we are doing New York State, we are doing Oregon. You need more understanding of your subsurface conditions than you had to have. Where these sites are being built, and all of you have access to that data, it is all in a government database. You could look over the next several years and look at where those sites are going to be built. That was some of the work we did before we began talking to APA.
We recognized, my God, if you look at where things are being built in rocky soils in Texas will be the largest build-out for the next five years. That is some really difficult soil down there, and we needed a solution. When you look at stuff going up in Idaho, in Oregon, right down the hail alley down through Texas. T he attachment rate of engineered foundations is going to go up. It will be driven by, again, the more difficult soils, but also in our ability to make an engineered foundation closer in cost to standard foundations. Let me be clear. Array sells foundations today, and I hate it. For me, when you are one of my partners and you come to me and say, "Look, I want to bundle," we use that bad word, "I want to bundle foundations and trackers.
Kevin, you need to go buy foundations for me for this project from this guy over here." I only get to mark them up 10%. That is highly dilutive to my gross margin journey, as you can imagine. Yes, does it increase that invoice by 20% or 30%? Sure. I f I do that, and I hate doing it, but I am forced into doing it, I really struggle hitting my margin ambitions. This is a way for us to say, "Hold on a second. I know you want us to go buy the foundations from over there." G uys, I have got a better foundation that I could offer you at a comparable price that is an engineered foundation.
By doing it in-house, controlling the design, and when you see later today the manufacturing capabilities at APA and what we are doing on these foundations, both in terms of Atlas I and Atlas II, we are going to be able to offer you a very compelling, better foundation solution that will work in any type of your soils, and because I am vertically integrated, I get a full margin on that. It increases my average ticket price, as you see in the math, 30%-40%. That is incredibly significant. I t is going to be driven by growth in terms of more difficult soils and then also increasing the attachment rate because I can compete with standard foundations very, very economically. Oh, by the way, I get 45X on my new design. I t becomes pretty compelling for us.
We are really comfortable with our ability to take on the foundation market, both in terms of engineered foundations and what we are calling the Atlas I is alternative foundation. When we think about our business, you have standard piles, standard foundations, then you have alternative, that is the Atlas I, and then you have engineered in terms of Atlas II. T hat is kind of the three buckets of how we are thinking about this. The more I could pull in, the more I could take 45X for myself, the more I could have full margin on foundations that my customers want me to sell them, the better.
Hey, Maheep Mandloi from Mizuho. You talked about the middle name of your EPC is the procurement, but the first name is engineering, and you're kind of offering them engineered products, right? Is there a push-pull between what they want to engineer versus what they're comfortable with you guys? As you kind of expand this BOS strategy, then maybe in the future, there's demand elsewhere, maybe EPCs want to automate or offshore a lot of it over here. What are you seeing over there?
When we think about engineering for us, we're already the ones responsible for engineering the tracker systems. With AWM, one of their core things that they do better than anyone is engineer the wire management system. What they're doing is by providing a higher degree of engineering in that system, they're enabling an EPC to use thinner wire, higher gauge wire, which is thinner wire, saving a tremendous amount of money. With AWM, they're engineering that site and providing an entire site to reduce your risk. We think engineering services becomes a larger piece of our business as we move forward, and we think there's other areas that our EPC partners are doing engineering that they would allow us to do for them, with them as we build out a broader engineering capability.
One of the things that you may know about my background, Neil and I ran together a nearly $400 million engineering services company for many, many years. We understand how to do that and how to bring that to bear, and we're excited about doing more of that with the products that you see represented today.
Yeah. One thing I'll add to that, just based on what Kevin mentioned as far as making things easier for our customers with the engineering side of things. Nick Strevel's team and I are working on an AI initiative to help drive automation in overall quotations. What that's going to allow us to do is drive a lot more optionality and consultative discussions with our customers, whether it's the developer, whether it's EPCs, around ways they could optimize their particular site design. If you could look back to the presentation that you saw earlier with Nick, he was talking about optionality around different sites. You want to optimize your power, you want to optimize your ground cover ratio, all the different things that can optimize the overall performance for a long-term asset.
We can bring that back now and do it in a matter of just a couple of days, which previously was 10 days to kind of get back to a quote. Now we can do it in a matter of a couple of days. Now it's going to get down to hours when we have this fully initiated later this year. There's a lot of things we're really investing in internally to drive that level of intimacy with our customers to make it much easier for them to look at the different options for them to maximize the investment that they're making.
Maybe if I can, a different question just on the APA growth. You guys talked about 17% in the first half, significant double digit going forward. If you could break down what's driving that seasonality, new customers, anything else which can kind of help us understand how to think about that next year.
Again, good question. Y eah, there was some seasonality in that 17% for the first half, but not in the direction you may think. It was weighed down by the fact that Q1 was incredibly low for APA, simply due to the frozen tundra that was the Northeast of the U.S., which is one of their primary markets. It was an incredibly slow start to the year, yet we were up 17% at the midyear. W hen we talk about acceleration through the back half, it's significant acceleration through the back half. We talked about their backlog growth, their penetration, and it's not in one part of their business, it's in every part of their business.
Their fixed tilt, as Josh mentioned, will have a record year this year, and he also disclosed that we'll have a record year next year because we already see what's coming our way for next year. When you see later on today, you see the adoption of the engineered foundations growing and growing in quotes, growing and growing. It's going to be growth throughout all parts of their business at this point, and you'll see that. It'll make all the sense in the world in an hour.
Hi. Jeremy Herring with Morgan Stanley. I wanted to ask about the battery storage opportunity, what types of products and solutions we are talking about with APA and then AWM. How material could that revenue be to the business, and then the timing and introduction of those solutions?
Sure. Great. We have products that have already been introduced, and we are now focused on increasing the adoption. With AWM, it is about really smart cable management systems for battery storage. Look, the way AWM approached utility scale solar was unique. Kudos to these two guys in the room. They identified an area of utility scale solar that was what I like to call under-engineered. It had not been looked at. The reason it had not been looked at was, hey, these are not incredibly expensive components, it is a small portion of the bill of materials, and hey, it was good enough as is. You think it was good enough until you see what it could be when these guys applied some really great engineering principles to that.
If you look at their growth rate, and one of the other things tying back to the Voice of the Customer, I love to spend time in the field. Every time I am going out into the field in the last six months and talking about wire management and seeing it, because we had already been working with the team at AWM on some joint things, I was like, "Hey, what is happening in wire management?" You hear, "Oh, AWM, they have really solved this problem. AWM, they are the fastest growing wire. AWM is kicking so-and-so's butt." That was the conversations we were having and saying, "Wow, these guys really have something special."
While they have done that really, really well in utility scale, they began to pivot and identify some opportunities in the battery storage, and then that led them to some additional opportunities over in the data center.
We think that is really strong. When you think about what happens on these sites and battery storage and stuff, you will get a sense of it when we get out to the field today, but on the APA side, you can go out and pour a concrete pad, and wait for that to dry for days, and then figure out how you are going to mount your stuff on it and put your piping, drill holes and get through all that. Or, hey, these alternative foundations actually hold up that inverter skid. They hold up parts of that battery storage system. It is a different way to do it quickly, almost instantaneously, to get some of those same products above ground where they need to be very quickly. We have products. We will continue to enhance selling those products into those other markets.
I think it is going to become an important part. I would say the AWM guys will tell you it is a fast-growing part. Their adoption of their great engineered products is going really well for them at this point. We are going to piggyback on that and expand it as we do, working with APA and AWM together. Some of the products you are going to see out in the field today are where these two teams, not Array, but these two teams have gotten together and co-developed products. You are going to see some of those today as well already. Even before we are part of the same company, they were working together on some new products, which make it real exciting.
All right. We are coming up on time, so we will take one final question if we have one in the room.
All right. A two-fer.
Thanks. Vikram again from Citi. I will ask a three-part question. First, I think from Neil, software revenues are up 100%. I was wondering what is driving that. Is it pricing? Is it upselling to existing customers? Are you like you have made significant changes to software revenues, or it is a function of just law of small numbers, it is rising from small numbers? Then to Kevin, it sounds like we saw the BESS and the DCI products, and foundations in BESS, wire management in DCI. Does Array have bigger ambitions in these two categories through M&A, part one? Is it fair to say that the M&A strategies focus more on non-solar or solar adjacent, but not purely solar at this point, so diversify out of solar for M&A? F inally to Keith, you mentioned three uses of cash, FCF to EBITDA, annual reinvestment into sustainability.
Is there a thumb rule for that? What percentage are you targeting for conversion of EBITDA to FCF? Given your view about solar installs, how much do you need for investment into the business, and what does that leave you in terms of flexibility into M&A? When you look at M&A, would you use equity more prominently going forward? You've used cash a lot in previous acquisitions. Is that going to be the strategy going forward? Thank you.
I think that was a seven-part question. There's a lot in there, Neil, you start.
All right. Let me take the first part of that. Software certainly has been a really compelling story, as Darin mentioned during his portion of the presentation. I think it was a little bit earlier in the year, Keith talked about software being probably one of our longest term kind of proof of concepts around a business model ultimately.
We've evolved our strategy as it relates to software. We've talked about SmarTrack being a compelling value, and Nick took us through all the features and functionalities and value that brings to a customer over the long-term life of the asset. I nitially, we were selling it as kind of a one-time sale attached to the tracker, and that was it. We were letting the EPC then run with it. We took a step back a couple quarters ago and said, "Hey, there's a better way for us to do this." It goes right in alignment with our focus on technical selling.
When you look at the investments we have made in the technical sales teams, the Array Innovation Center, and we had started looking at the discrete value that our SmarTrack software and all the features and capability that it brings to a customer, we said, "Hey, let us take a step back. Let us look at this a little bit differently, and let us then look at this on a go-forward basis in a twofold way." One is obviously for new tracker sales and making sure we are looking at that, not as a one-time sale, but looking at that as a recurring revenue opportunity going forward. W hen you look at the many gigawatts of deployments we have had to date, we just crossed, as we very publicly talked about, 100 gigawatts of embedded base sold around the world.
We have a great embedded base in the United States to go back and look at SmarTrack software for that embedded base in locations where it is being underutilized. Doing software trials, having a specific sales team that is focused around it, and then building from there. W hat you see the momentum when you look at the doubling of that revenue year-over-year and the trajectory continuing, it is a specific result of the change in strategy that we have had, the investments we have made, and frankly, the value that customers are seeing in the value that we bring along the way. W e think that trajectory is going to continue, and we are going to continue making investments in the software platform itself, along with the selling techniques to continue to see in that p rogression.
I would say one of the things to add on there is that probably about a year and a half ago or so now, we changed the leadership of our software organization from engineering led, so highly technical, yes, we know we have great, to commercial led. W e brought in people that knew how to sell software differently, and that is the pivot from you imagine we were giving our software away one time at an upfront sales price of $1,500. Yet, with Nick's technical sales team coming in and then starting to do the valuation of that 1% that we talked about and how much that is really worth, oh my god, were we leaving a lot on the table.
Now it is a subscription service you buy into and you pay, and that is how we are getting a higher quality recurring revenue at ultra high margin.
While it is impressive to say that we have doubled the sales of software, look, this is going to continue to grow recurring revenues at much, much higher margins. Right? I t took rebuilding a team and refocusing the team not on, wow, we could have really cool technology, we have something to sell and get value for and extract value. That is kind of a big part of the pivot.
Absolutely.
that we did. I got part 2, which was about M&A, I believe. The question is really about are we going to continue to do M&A in utility scale solar? Look, I think there are some things in utility scale solar we could continue to partner with. There may be some continued bolt-ons. T o your point, we are looking at how do we do things to move faster into some of those high growth adjacencies using what we have, strong customer relationships, strong platform of technology and engineering, and how do we platform that into battery energy storage and then also take advantage of more of some of the hypergrowth in data centers. I will say it would not surprise me if we did something more in utility as long as it lends itself to those adjacencies, but also looking at those adjacencies more wholeheartedly.
All right, Vikram, you asked a few questions but knowing you well enough, I think you are going at something, and I will go straight to it. The pref is not a problem, and the pref today goes cash paid here in August. It will divert some of our free cash flow to service the pref. However, when you think about how much free cash flow we can generate or convert from EBITDA, we are going to be very mindful to monitor so that that percentage of free cash flow used by the pref still leaves us with enough flexibility to reinvest in our platform, to also then to continue to do some tuck-in acquisitions. Why we used cash more than we have used equity so far, it is because we have been cash generative.
We have long said that at the stage of the core of the business, we run this business with a target for having about $500 million of net available liquidity, which we have. We have stepped up the revolver. Revolver is about $370 million. We closed this quarter, Q2, with $300 million of cash in hand, which puts us well over $600 million plus of net available liquidity. With the equity under current pressure, which we cannot understand, and you and I talk about this all the time, that does not leave me much option to go out and use equity right now. Because I have the liquidity, these are tuck-in acquisitions, I think it is best to use the cash to do it.
When I think about the pref, I recognize the common shareholders will always write, now that is gone cash pay, be very focused on what is diverting from reinvesting in growth in the business and, or being diverted to the pref. L ook, if I was to go out and refinance the pref tomorrow with term debt, I will put it into perspective. My revolver is based on SOFR plus 300+ of spread. If I drew my revolver tomorrow, all in interest cost is higher than the pref. The pref does have its idiosyncrasies, meaning, hey, you are not getting a tax deduction for the coupon and so forth. That is why in Kevin's thoughts about it earlier as he shared, we monitor it vigilantly. We are monitoring the interest rate environment. We are monitoring where our equity is.
We are monitoring what all the optionalities are because we are always going to look to try to optimize the capital structure. A t this moment, the pref is not a problem. In 2027, the pref will not be a problem. It will take up $35 million of cash, but we are hoping that we will revert to our long-term free cash flow conversion levels. We are in a growth mode. We have a back-ended year this year, so Q4 is going to be a significantly high quarter. T he inventory investment, the receivables get piled up at the end of the year. That is why the free cash conversion is low this year. Hopefully I got to the core of where you were going.
Yeah.
Look, as you would expect, we have stress tested our views on cash flow relative to servicing the pref as well, and we feel very comfortable that even in stressful conditions, we get that this is a market that has cycles. E ven under stress scenarios, we do not have an issue servicing the pref at this point.
All right. With that, we are going to conclude our live Q&A session. On behalf of Array Technologies and APA, we thank you for all your thoughtful questions today and for being here. A replay of today's webcast, along with our presentation materials, will be posted to our investor relations website. Thank you again, and for those in person, we will be providing lunch in the adjacent room, and we will be departing for APA for the second portion of our day at about 12:15 P.M. Thank you.
Feel free, for those of you going with us this afternoon, to dress down a little bit. We are going to be in kind of a sandbox, so just know that we are okay. We will all be changing into kind of like Peter Millar pullovers and jeans. Right? F eel free to dress down if you have that option, because it is going to be more casual as we go out into the field. We are going to be in a real working factory with lots of stuff at 1,800 degrees and welders going and stuff like that. J ust know that while we appreciate you adhering for the video to our dress code, you are really welcome to dress down as we go through the rest of the day. Okay? Thank you, guys.