Welcome to the 2020 Annual Meeting for SolarEdge Technologies Incorporated. Our host for today's call is Zvi Landau. At this time, all participants will be in a listen only mode. I would now like to turn the call over to your host. Mr.
Landau, you may begin.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of SolarEdge is called to order and the polls are now open. I am Selena, I will present as the chair of today's meeting. In light of the COVID-nineteen pandemic, we believe that a virtual meeting provides greater access to those who wanted to attend this annual meeting. We have designed the format of the annual meeting to provide you with the same rights and opportunities to participate as you would in person meeting.
Thank you for joining us. We're very pleased to have you here with us today. For this, I would like now to introduce several people who are here with us today: Juan Enfeyer, our CFO Rachel Frenscholnik, who will serve as the Secretary of this meeting and on the line is our Chairman of the Board, Nadav Tafurio as well. We will conduct the business portion of our meeting first and answer questions at the end of the meeting. Though we may not be able to answer every question, we will do our best to provide a response to as many as possible.
Now let's turn to our formal agenda. The agenda for the meeting and the rules of conduct and procedures for the meeting are available on the virtual meeting platform. We ask that participants abide by these rules. As set forth in
the rules of the meeting and
in our corporate government documents, the only matters to be discussed and acted upon by the shareholders at this meeting are set forth in the agenda statement. This meeting is being held pursuant to the notice of the Annual Meeting of Shareholders, which was made available as our proxy statement of our 2019 Annual Report. The proxy materials were first made available on or about April 7, 2020 to the shareholders of record at the close of business on March 2020. The Board of Directors has appointed Rachel Frishkornick as Inspector for the matters to be voted on at today's meeting. Rachel has presented me with copies of the notice of annual meeting, the proxy statement and the form of proxy, together with proof by Arthur Davis of the makings by Broadridge on April 7, 2020, to each shareholder of record as of the close of business on March 20, 2020.
ASP has presented me with a list of company entitled to vote at this meeting as of the record date. This list has been on file at the principal office of the company for inspection during normal business hours prior to the meeting and will be open for inspection throughout this meeting. At this time, any shareholders that are logged in and who have not already submitted a already done so to complete their voting, I'd like to remind you that some of the statements made at this meeting may be considered forward looking. The company cautions its investors that results of future operations may differ from those anticipated. We urge you to review the cautionary statements and other information contained in the company's public filings included in our annual report for fiscal 2019 and our financial report for the Q1 of 2020, which identifies certain factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in any forward looking statements made during this meeting.
I will now report the number of votes represented at this meeting, either in person or by proxy. Chairman, a total of 49,598,007 196 shares of common stock of SolarEdge Technologies Inc. Were outstanding on March 20, 2020 and entitled to be voted at this annual meeting. Holders of shares of common stock are entitled to vote 1 vote per share. Proxies representing approximately 70.7 percent of the shares of common stock outstanding and eligible to vote have been received.
Thank you. Based on the Secretary's report, I'll declare a quorum's presence. The proxies solicited by the Board of Directors designate, Vivenando and Rachel Proskolnik to vote the shares represented by those proxies.
The first item on the agenda is the election of directors. Under the company's articles of incorporation, the members of the Board of Directors are divided into 3 classes with approximately 1 third of the directors standing for business today is the election of 2 Class 2 Directors, each to hold office until the 3rd Annual Meeting of Shareholders following the election and until their successors are elected and duly qualified. The 2 Class 2 directors standing for election as nominated by our Board of Directors and as set forth in the proxy statement are Tal Payne and Marcel Ghanney. The Board has unanimously recommended a vote for each of the Director nominees. 2nd item on the agenda is ratification of appointments of independent public accounting firms.
Specifically, the audit committee has appointed as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2020. The Board has unanimously recommended approval of this proposal as well. The final item of business is the vote on an advisory and non binding basis on the compensation of our named executive officers commonly referred to as the say on paper proposal. The Board unanimously recommended approval of this proposal. That concludes the matters to be voted on at this meeting.
The polls are now closed. That concludes our formal business. The formal portion of the meeting is now adjourned. I will announce the preliminary results. Mr.
Chairman, the preliminary results of the meeting are as follows. On proposal number 1, the votes cast for each of the Class II Director nominees represent majority of those cast for Class II Director nominees. Subject to the confirmation by the Inspector of Election, the 2 Class 2 nominees are elected directors, each to hold office until the 3rd annual meeting shareholders following their election and until their successors are elected and duly qualified. On proposal number 2, the Vocus P4 a registered public accounting firm for the company for the year ending December 31, 2020 exceed the vote cash against the proposal. Subject to the confirmation by the Inspector of Elections, the Supreme Court had ratified the appointment be wise.
Proposal number 3, the votes cast for approval on an advisory basis of the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement exceed the votes cast against the proposal. We will provide the final voting results as certified by the Inspector of Election in a Form 8 ks filed with the SEC.
Thank you. A quorum has been present and we have had a legal meeting. The meeting is adjourned. For those present to remain, we will now hold a brief question and answer session.
So there's been one question question is, your main MLPE competitor is offering continued power production for the home when the grid is down. Do you have or will you have something similar? And second, when do you expect to get solar non GAAP gross margins back to the 36% to 38% level?
Good morning. Thank you very much for the question. Starting with the question about the backup when the grid is down. Actually, SolarEdge presented backup product already exist in the market. It's already installed with various battery manufacturers with a few 1,000 or even tens of thousands of systems in the field.
Actually, we also announced in the last quarter earnings call our new EnergyHub product. This is a much more advanced product that is based on the HD wave topology of inverters. It's a product that allows to have much easier installation, very smooth one that allows the compatibility with the battery and with other systems that are controlled with our inverters. And therefore, this is something that exists already, that is working already. And in the future, we also expect to have our own SolarEdge battery coming at the second half of the end of this year.
And by that time, we will be able to provide a complete system with both the inverter that allows to have the backup capabilities both with other batteries and also our battery that will be suitable to work with this product. The second question about getting back with the solar non GAAP gross margin. It is important to note that the gross margins of the company hasn't or the production hasn't changed dramatically over the last few months since we announced it during the Analyst Day. At that time, in the middle of November, we guided that we believe that gross margins should be at the range of 36% plusminus 1% on the solar business of the company. What we did see in the Q4 and we are seeing also in the second quarter is that in the 4th and in the first quarter of last year and beginning of this year, our gross margins were affected by a large portion of air shipments that drove our margins down.
These air shipments were a necessity given the very fast growth that we experienced that was far beyond our manufacturing capabilities, and we needed to match those capabilities while shortening the time in which we deliver our products. During the Q2 of 2020, we expect to reduce these air shipments to minimum. But due to the effect of COVID-nineteen, we are expected to see higher portion of revenues coming from Europe and the rest of the world that are markets that characterize with lower margins due to changes in the currency rate and also because of the more competitive environment. At the same time, the U. S.
Market that is characterized with a higher margin is affected a little bit more by COVID. And therefore, we expect, as we said in our guidance, that the portion of the U. S. Sales that are usually bringing the margins up are going to be less dominant. We believe that once the COVID-nineteen effect will be milder or cease to exist, and this is something that, of course, we do not know when.
But once we will have approximately fifty-fifty percent of U. S. And non U. S. Revenues, we expect that margins should be again in the same or solar margins in the same 36%, give or take 1% as we guided in the Analyst Day.
Thank you very much. There are no further questions and so we will adjourn the meeting. Thank you everybody for the call. Thank you
for joining. Thank you very much.
This now concludes the meeting. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day.