My name is Siobhan Hickie, SunPower's VP of IR. I would like to welcome everyone to the first quarter 2026 earnings call. I will review a few housekeeping items before turning the call over to our CEO, T.J. Rodgers. All lines have been placed on mute at this time. This call is being recorded, and a replay will be available within the events section of SunPower's website. Please note that today's presentation may contain projections and other forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied in our statements. Also on today's call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of any differences between those non-GAAP financial measures and the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are available within our press release.
Lastly, we will be holding a question and answer session after the end of formal remarks today. For those watching via the webcast, you may submit a written question at any time via the submission box located on the right hand side of your screen. For those joining our live Q&A, please click the Raise Hand icon located at the bottom of your screen to enter the queue. With that, I will turn the call over to T.J. Rodgers, SunPower's Chairman and CEO.
Good morning. We've got the Q1 2026 results to show you this morning and answer questions. First, top lines, Q1 2026 revenue $72.8 million. That was down 9% from our guidance. Our latest guidance was $80 million, the market closed softer than we thought it would. Not catastrophic. 9% down quarter-over-quarter is not bad, it was weaker than we expected. This revenue alone would have impacted our Operating Income for $1.8 million. Our non-GAAP Operating Income was -$12.9 million, and that is a one-time event because we added $9.9 million in spending during the quarter. We had anticipated and still do anticipate a great Q3, and we started hiring 86 people last quarter.
Now we turned it around. We've gone from plus 86 to minus 115. Our cash was flat. You know, we raised $40 million, $41 million during the quarter. We used all of it to pay off debt, except to keep working cash at around $10 million. Since that time, this means since the beginning of May, we've cut our costs $9.9 million a quarter. That included RIF'd employees, 115. We went from 86 hires to 115 RIFs. We installed an across-the-board 4-day workweek through September. The theory on a 4-day weekend comes from my prior life in semiconductors. It's extremely difficult to build up a good workforce, and the last thing you wanna do in a yo-yo economy is lose your good people.
We did have a layoff. This was focused on overhead and redundancy among our 4 startups. In the sales and fulfillment area and the install area, we went to a 4-day workweek. What that means is, you work 4 days a week, you get paid for 4 days a week. Another way to look at that is a 25, or excuse me, a 20% pay cut. When you come out of it, you start working another day, the people you've got remain in place, and you have less of a arduous climb back. That was the theory on the 4-day work week. We've cut our inside sales group. We had a large call center.
We've cut it down to those needed to maintain our pipeline there, because I use the word paradoxically, call center sales have a lower profit margin and worse cash flow profile than our conventional sales force, which has now grown to 1,552 members, that represents 90% of our revenue. The inside sales group was using a lot of purchased leads from the market, and we wanted to get rid of that expense. We will continue this function, but at a reduced scale with the top producers. We reduced our finance admin costs, which had ballooned, not for any bad reason, but basically we went through an audit.
It was arduous, very arduous, and we just allowed anybody to be hired, either contract or employee that we needed without restriction. We brought that back down. You've seen this graph pretty much all the time. It's my proxy. It's actually the way I run the company. It's a metric I can understand and people can understand. We actually run it on dollars, but I report it on headcount. If you go back to pre-merger, there were 3,500 SunPower and Complete Solaria people. We picked 1,280 of them to start the company. Year ago, Q4 was our first quarter, we successively dropped that target over time. We have been in a period where the target's been 820, which is very lean.
We bounce up and down around 820 as we acquire companies who will bring in 100 people, from over 100 people from Ambia, for example, and then that pops us up, and then we work it back down with Synergy. Now just this quarter, we've dropped our target to 700. We think that's doable, and we're currently at 710. I wanted to talk about that before I went into the 2026 forecast. The cuts reduced our operating expense by $9.9 million a quarter. That's done. They were too late to make Q1 2026 better, hence the -$12 million loss. They will be in effect for 60% of the second quarter, and they will have a significant positive impact in the second quarter.
Our current Q2 2026 revenue estimate is $75 million. It's up $3 million from last quarter, still anemic, and the market is still anemic. We are starting with our acquisitions, starting to be able to bounce off the bottom. The operating loss will be reduced to $3 million based on the cuts that I talked about earlier. We're going to have a reasonable quarter, but a loss this quarter. Finally, an early forecast ahead more than 1 quarter. In Q3, we believe we're going to beat $96 million. I'll explain that in a little while. At $96 million in that quarter, we will be profitable and cash flow positive. We're going through a weak but mildly weak quarter on our way to a plan we've had all year.
That plan is shown here. This particular version of the plan is the one we used to raise money. We raised $41 million in the last quarter. Here you see revenue all the way through for 3 years. The guidance, meaning that's what I'm telling you and I'm planning on achieving and expect to be criticized if I don't meet it, guidance, and then out here is a model. Our $1 billion, our mission statement is to have $1 billion in revenue, and that run rate will be achieved in Q3 of 2028, so that's still on target. We're still talking about a big jump in revenue in 2026, and you can see that this is the non-trivial gap here.
As we've shown and put on the website, it is because our acquisitions, Ambia, Sunder, Cobalt, and the recovery of New Homes from the bankruptcy, they're all kicking in, and that's what we expect to give us a big jump in revenue in 2026. I put 2 more lines in here to show you where we are. We've done careful calculations. Our current break-even revenue, op inc break-even revenue, $76 million, and our current cash flow break-even revenue is $96 million. This $20 million extra, times the various yields going through the P&L is what's required to pay for the debt that we've got. We still are anticipating big growth in Q3. I'll let Dan McCranie's here.
He's running sales and marketing for us right now on a daily basis. I'll let him talk about that later. As a matter of fact, I'll let him talk about it now. Dan?
Thanks, T.J. Can I get the graph up, please? Thanks. This graph is total bookings beginning in Q4 2024, going on through Q1 of 2026. Just a brief word of what this definition of bookings is. This is just not a signed a home improvement contract from a customer. This is actually a signed contract plus a completion of the design plus funding approval. It's a robust, high-yielding bookings. That's what we use for our forecast methodology. You can see in Q4 2024 all the way through Q3 of 2025, the numbers were hovering around 1,500 to 2,500 jobs a quarter. You see a step function increase in Q4 2025. Remember, we acquired all three of our major acquisitions, Sunder, Ambia, and Cobalt, in Q4 of 2025.
Beginning in the second half of 2024, we started seeing the results of their bookings. You can see over 4,000 jobs were created in Q4 2025. In Q1 2026, we had a record of 4,446 jobs. Remember, there's about a 3-month lag between a booking and revenue in this particular industry. What we're booking for in Q2 now is, beginning now, is for the first stages of our Q3 revenue plan. T.J. showed you that we have a very robust Q3 numbers, a step function up, from about $75 million to $130 million. T.J. told you we're guaranteeing at least 96 and above that. We are currently on track in Q2 with the bookings we've got so far across all departments to meet that $130 million number.
We're happy with the way the bookings are going. It's predominantly the Sunder and Ambia turn on that's occurring, particularly in the springtime when the contracts get much larger compared to the winter. Going forward in Q2 2026, you're of course gonna have a record in bookings, and we think we're gonna have a record in bookings that allow us to do revenue in Q3 well in excess of T.J.'s $96 million.
Dan's used two words, guarantee and well in excess of $96 million. I can tell you right now that our lawyer in New York has just had a myocardial infarction, and he's laying on the floor. We'll call people to kind of recover him. I wanna make one other point here. These jobs, I don't deal with solar backlog is like oatmeal. It's just not firm. You can't tell where you're at. We have a definition the company means you have a signed contract, that is the guy signed up to begin with. You designed his home for him, and you showed him the contract, you showed him pictures and went again, and he signed up on that. You told him the funding was approved.
We've gone through our funders, and he was approved. Today, third-party ownership or TPO is the way people fund it, meaning, the funder is gonna pay for the house and then only installation, and his house will be part of a pseudo-utility later on for that funder. Funder. Okay. This is really good news. Normally, if I weren't talking about a $12 million loss, I'd be bragging about this and talking about big things in the future, and I still feel that way. Huh?
Bernard.
Bernard. What's wrong is what we changed. Boys, I worked till midnight last night on this thing. There are pages missing. I need to take about a two-minute break and bring out a memory stick here and load a computer with things I forgot, like our new CFO. Our new board member. I put it in my briefcase. I could tell you that I had planned this in advance, but that wouldn't be true. All right. Now I go to PowerPoint. Rise this thing. I'll give you the first page right now. Okay. That one I gave you. Nope. Convertible note offering, I talked about. Bookings are a record we talked about. We saw the detail. We filed our 10-K. It was a difficult audit.
I'm gonna talk about that audit and what happened. The audit required restatements, three restatements, three quarters of restatements, and they're gonna happen on time. That means within the next week. Here's the P&L. In Q4 2025, the last quarter, we did $90 million in revenue with $3 million in profit. Note 4 says we restated 10-Q results consistent with adjustments in the 2025 10-K. We've got a 10-K. That's God's word. That's filed. Everything is gonna be consistent with it starting today. I just wanted to point out that, and I will show you in a minute, that these numbers were what we reported before, and they were close to being right on, and I'll tell you why they weren't. Q1, $72 million, $12 million loss.
If you ask why the loss, it's right here. Operating expense going up dramatically for the reason I already said, we're getting ready for Q3. We're going to get ready for Q3, but we're going to get ready for Q3 in a shorter period of time. If I look at the 10-K audit, this is called prior quarterly results, so it's what I told you last year in meetings like this one. We were profitable in every quarter, minimally profitable in every quarter, and our non-GAAP op inc added up to $10.9 million on $308 million in revenue distributed like this throughout the quarter. After adjustments, post-10-K audit, the total op inc for the quarter dropped to $7.33 million.
Given the changes in the quarters, that was a pretty good result. The revenue for the company dropped to $300, and I'll explain that in a minute. There was one error there that caused that. If I look at the quarters, this is the first quarter of the new year after the acquisition, and in the 10-K audit, we uncovered a bunch of stuff and they had write-offs. They took our profit from $2.984 million, what I would call cash profit, down to a loss. There was a little bit of bleed over into Q2, and then Q3 became more profitable. In this case, this is non-GAAP profit, where we have put in actual cash gross margin.
The GAAP numbers have a different gross margin, which is lower than the actual cash collected based on some rules about acquisitions, where you're not allowed to acquire something and then have more than your average gross margin reported for it. In this case, our the actual cash gross margin was 80%, and that means we made more money according to GAAP than I reported. Okay. Old, new, and I'll just point out one thing. This is the new source of truth. When I talk about record profit in the future, it'll be because we're above 4.85, not above 3.5. When I talk about record revenue, it will be because we're above $91 million. This is history.
I wanted to show the comparison to show you that we played it straight for the entire year, and I wanted to. Actually, if you wanna ask which is the more believable scenario from a businessman's point of view, the answer is this one right here. This includes a lot of put this in that quarter, put that in that quarter. This is on your books, we've got to clean it up. We actually took the record quarter we ever had, and it got bigger. So it is what it is. This is the new source of truth. This is our base.
The good thing about it is for this amount of revenue and this amount of profit, I now have fully audited quarterly results where I will have in a few days when we submit the restated report, and we go forward with a clean set of books and a better accounting capability than we had. I want to talk about the audit for a minute. The standard auditing method is to sample line items from our books, and you have to sample because there are too many line items to actually look at every one. The auditors ask us to supply independent third-party documentation that validates the books. What does that mean?
For a given order, for example, revenue, they want the home improvement contract, they want the work orders that showed we sent people to their house, they want the drawings for the system that shows we designed it, they want the invoices for the panels that we bought and other things, so everything we bought to work on the house. They want the work logs, what crew went in what house when. They want the customer invoices. We billed them. Here's the bill. These are all hard proof points. They want proof of payment, they really did pay you. Then that means bank account showing money went into the bank as a cash flow kind of thing. Then they want proof of activation.
The system you built actually is running as we speak, and that involves typically getting a utility bill and showing them that there's been a change in the bill based on the solar. It is an arduous task, the audit, the 10-K audit, and there's only 1 audit a year that matters. It's 10-K, and that's the entire year. Then the quarters are unaudited till the end, and that's when you have the final statement. Okay. How big is all this? There are 9 steps in our solar installation process that lead to revenue. Our auditors required proof with hard third-party evidence on each of the 9 steps, on each of our 11,500 jobs in 2025. You multiply those numbers, you get over 100,000 line items. That means you have to sample.
In the sampling process, they go in, grab some, make you go through all of this stuff for it and prove it and document it. The sampling in this year required 309-- it led to 390 formal requests. 390 times our auditors said, "We need this," or, "We need that." By the way, I'm not making excuse here. Our accounting isn't where it ought to be. I'll tell you in a minute, the head accounting guy is now T.J. Rodgers. He's not used to this kind of accounting and will be better in the future. Like right now being the future. Our prior quarter reports that I just showed you showed well versus the 10-K, the truth, the source of truth for full year revenue.
The 10-K audited number for 2025 revenue was $300 million versus what we stated was $308 million. When we went back to find out what happened, the extra $8 million in revenue in the prior quarterly reports came from double booking a legacy company, Blue Raven, which doesn't exist anymore, from a defunct computing system, Albatross, which doesn't exist anymore. Somebody way back when, we're talking now probably Q4 of the prior year, booked jobs twice, and they came into our books, and we didn't start selling the things we acquired from SunPower until midyear, and then we didn't really start looking through what we inherited until the end of the year for the 10-K audit. Which by the way, I don't consider to be annoyance.
I consider it to be something that gives credibility to the company. That's why we're working hard on it. I'll show you what we've done. Okay, on the income side, Operating Income, I always use Operating Income rather than EBITDA, which I don't like. Our prior statement was $10.9 million. The new number was $7.3 million. The difference that was due primarily to pre-acquisition balance sheet assets, as I told you, using actual gross margin instead of a calculated gross margin. I'll show you this. I will show you. Nice having memorized this thing. These are the quarters that came from these quarters. This is the yearly total. It's really the only part of the 10-K.
These things exist only because of the requirement to do a restated 10-Q. These differences are big. Obviously, it went from a loss from profit to a loss in a quarter. That's when the auditors said, "We have to restate." We're doing that, and we've actually already done it. We already have agreement on the numbers. There's a filing coming up this week or early next week. Okay. Revenue did well. The extra revenue came from a double booking in an old system. The operating income, I showed a difference, but really the quarters being so different triggered the requirement to restate in Q1 2025 through Q3 2025. I stand for financial integrity.
I go, and this is an accounting term, , when I don't see numbers that are perfectly right and believable, and I've always been that way. I've been doing this stuff for 40 years. This is the first time I've ever had a restatement. All of a sudden, I had this horrible thought. When you lived in semiconductor nirvana, did you really never have a restatement, or did your finance guys who let you work on Moore's Law and transistors and they took care of finances, did your finance guys have a restatement here or there to that you didn't know about? When you're bragging about, "I've never had a restatement in my career," is it really true? I went on AI, "Is Cypress Semiconductor ever restate a quarter?" Let me start over here.
I did it 4 times. I've shown 2 of the 4. I changed the question because the answers changed, and I wanted to get a good look at it. Based on available search results, there is no direct indication that Cypress Semiconductor ever formally restated a quarterly report. The provided information shows during its time as an independent, publicly traded company, it warned of misses. The company often warned of upcoming quarterly shortfalls due to changing market, lowered guidance. They lowered earnings and revenue targets, such as September of 2004. They adjusted results. They reported GAAP versus non-GAAP results in 2016 and 2017 to account for acquisition-related costs. The search results do not contain reports of accounting errors, fraud, or formal financial restatements. I read this 1 second because it's got a little kudo for me in there.
It says, "The company, particularly under longtime CEO T.J. Rodgers, was known for a strong, no-nonsense approach to financial reporting." What has changed? I will not tolerate not having perfect finances, period. Period. No question, no debate, no meetings. We've changed. This first statement, we have received and accepted the resignation of CFO. I am not blaming this on our CFO. It's my fault, T.J. Rodgers' fault. That simple. I run the company, and if it's not perfect, it's my fault. We're changing CFOs. It's a mutual agreement to part ways and we've also agreed not to sling any mud at all in either direction. I have been appointed by the Board of Directors to SunPower's principal financial officer.
That's what you get called if you aren't really an accountant, but you run the finances for approximately 1 month. We're in the process of closing a new CFO, I'll be the principal financial officer for 1 month, I can guarantee you, I go to 2 meetings a day on finances. Although I'm not an accountant, I can read stuff and I can understand what's right and what's wrong based on all my experience. The board has appointed Bernard Gutmann, 8 years the CFO of the $42 billion chip company ON Semiconductor, to the board and to serve on our Audit Committee. We've made changes on our board to bolster our board. I want to introduce Bernard right now. He signed up last week, he was at his first board meeting last week.
Let me tell a story about Bernard. Are you showing his picture now? All right. You guys should be able to see Bernard now. I met Bernard. We're at Enovix right now. That's my free TV studio, so I don't have to do something at SunPower. Bernard is on the Enovix board, the battery company. I've noted, I sit right across from him in the board meetings, he's extraordinarily meticulous. Walks out, unlike me, he's got almost perfect handwriting, and he walks out with three pages of single line item notes every time. We've had zero problems at Enovix. I have now two validations, my old company and Enovix, that the ship can get run right and you shouldn't have things like restatements. It's just not okay. Okay. I know Bernard.
How do I know him? My SPAC invested in Enovix. We took them public. On my SPAC board was a guy named Manny Hernandez, who was my CFO. They created CFO heaven for me while I was running a chip company, and I got to work on Moore's Law, and he had no restatements for 30 years. He wanted to retire, truly, lot of grandkids, all that stuff. We said, "You can't do it." He said, "I've got a guy who's as good as me. Matter of fact, I trained him." I met Bernard Gutmann, and he was absolutely right. These are the two best CFO guys I've ever met.
With that little anecdote, I'd like to introduce Bernard, have him tell you a little bit about himself and what he saw at the first board meeting, if he's up for it. Bernard?
Thank you, T.J., for these kind words. I'm very excited to join the SunPower board. As T.J. mentioned, I had an opportunity last Friday to review and attend as an observer the board meeting and it was quite exciting. It is definitely with the issues that T.J. talked about from the finance point of view, a little bit of a challenge in the short run. I'm up for that challenge. It makes it even more exciting. I think we can set up the right processes and controls in place so that this doesn't reoccur. From the business point of view, again, I will be careful not to get the lawyers and other attack, what I saw was quite exciting.
With the successive amount of acquisitions that have been done, the pipeline seems to be quite exciting and Dan talked about it with the more than 4,000 bookings that are predicting some pretty good stuff to go in the future. Go beyond just the break-even, but into the moving towards the $1 billion opportunity that T.J. talked about. That by itself, business-wise, is quite exciting. Quickly from my background, I'm a industrial engineer by degree. However, I have worked more than close to 40 years, primarily in finance.
I worked at Motorola and ON Semiconductor in all kinds of roles, starting from the bottom as a financial analyst in a semiconductor factory in Guadalajara, Mexico, growing all the way up to becoming the CFO for the last 8 years of my career in this pretty heavy manufacturing environment to all kinds of activities, including debt financings, including audits, including operational stuff. My background is quite adept for helping TJ and the board in this upcoming challenge. I'm ready for it. Thank you, TJ.
I will give away one little secret. When Bernard Gutmann accepted, he said, "It's a really interesting company, but the pay sucks." Bernard Gutmann is like me. He's doing something that's interesting to him. What has changed? The SunPower team responsible for implementing Sarbanes-Oxley accounting procedures, if we had that in place right now, we wouldn't be talking about this topic. We've changed the line of command through the quality Vice President, Surinder Bedi, directly to the Chairman of our Audit Committee. The people who had been sucked into the hubbub of the audit working on SOX are going back to work on SOX only. The Chairman of our Audit Committee is Ron Pasek.
He's the only other former CFO on the board, and he and I were overwhelmed with when the audit came in with so many adjustments required. Both of us were quite surprised. I always brag about having eight former CEOs on the board. We have an extraordinarily good board. Right now I wish I had four CEOs and four CFOs, but we made a big step forward here. All SunPower responses to audit questions, so the 390, are now formal documents as opposed to telephone calls between us and the auditors. Formal documents that are pre-reviewed by the quality department, and they have a spec for when you respond to an auditor, what that response needs to contain.
If you don't follow it, they reject your response, and it doesn't go to the auditor. They understand they can't be slow, so they typically deliver an audited document, our own internal audit, 2 hours after the request. We never would have made it through the audit in time if we hadn't turned on this process, and it will That's the way we're gonna work forever. We bolstered our finance team. We needed to do more with people from operations and quality. I'm talking about 10-ish from either or both groups. The finance guys, and the reason I'm not casting aspersion on any of them, were getting questions that were beyond their scope. I mean, a very common result in solar is the guy owes you money.
You call him up, he doesn't answer. You call him up, he doesn't answer. You call him up, he doesn't answer. You find out he doesn't live there anymore. His financing expires, so you can't get the last payment. You have to get permission from the new owners to get in the house. If there's something wrong, you've got to work on it. All you have to do is have something like 500 to 1,000 jobs like that pile up, which they easily can over the period of a couple of years, and that is the quality poison that I see is more responsible for the malaise in the solar industry than anything else.
This way, we're putting together a team to respond to those questions and preempt them in the future, creating processes such that nothing happens that isn't pre-audited in our own company. Okay, I gave you this one and this one and this one. We've done our cuts. They'll be two-thirds effective this quarter. This quarter will still be weak but better than last quarter, and the losses will be contained a lot better. I validated again the model we used, and it's on our couple websites, and said we are going to make this jump. It's real. One of the reasons you've been hearing about Sunder for a while, I just make this one point. Sunder is a sales company.
Sunder manages 1,500 reps with 100 or so internal people, and their product is a signed contract, one of those contracts with all of the parts that I said earlier. They therefore have sold their product, and it's gone. There is no pipeline inside of Sunder, is really the point. When you buy them, you buy a machine that creates orders, and you don't start collecting orders in your own pipeline until after they're signed up, and that's why it's taken a while to fill up the pipeline. The same is true for New Homes, where we've gotten a lot of orders for New Homes, but that pipeline was dumped actually before we took over, took over the SunPower assets.
That pipeline was already dumped too because the builders, the corporations, they moved on, and they were gone, and we had to refill that pipeline. Then I pointed out, and you can write these numbers down and do incremental calculations on them, when we get profitable and when we get profitable and positive cash flow. Dan talked about the business. Now I'm ready for questions. I apologize for the mix-up. I'm sitting here thinking, "How could that possibly happen?" The answer is, we mail a few of my slides in a not the final slides. I worked on them last night. The email here, those slides we used to bring up the protection system and everything. They weren't intended to be the report, but that's what I ended up showing you. Apologies for that. Questions?
Thank you. Our first question today comes from Derek Soderberg at Cantor Fitzgerald. Derek, you may go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning, everyone. T.J., I appreciate all the detail you provided on the business here. I wanna start with the record bookings number. Specifically, what's the average revenue per job in the current mix, what's the assumed conversion timeline from booking to recognized revenue? I've got a follow-up.
You have it. Hey, Derek. The average selling price right now is about $32,000 per installation. Just as an aside, that's going up as more and more of the installations have battery attach. Battery attach is big, as you know, in California, where it's almost 100% battery attach, and we're getting very strong in California. About 45% in Texas. ASP is $32,000 and climbing through the year. Your next question involved, I think, the cycle time associated, the time between FTC or a hard order and revenue.
Yeah.
Was that the question?
Yeah.
It's the median right now on that is right around 2 months, 2-plus months. It ranges anywhere from a low of about 35 days to a high of about 115 days, depending upon the complexity of the roof install. We use as a general rule of thumb about 90 days. If you see our bookings pop in Q2, just track about 1 quarter forward and you should see the grand bulk of that revenue.
The corollary of that is, in the fourth quarter, when things start to slow down, you've got a bunch of bookings, and that 90 days worth of bookings jumps from Q3 to Q4. You hit January and we're still, promising to come out of the January, February, March malaise, and we can see it.
Got it. That's helpful. and then TJ, we're seeing some other solar companies, you know, over the past 6 months or so, specifically, you know, a big residential installer, you know, filing Chapter 11. Can you talk about that dynamic a bit, what you're seeing out there, and are you guys benefiting yet from survivorship? Thanks.
Benefiting from survivorship. We're seeing bankruptcies. The big surprise, and it's public, was Freedom Forever. They're bigger than us, they should be more robust than us in terms of hard times. We benefited from getting some of their salespeople. Not a lot. We've already acquired 3 other sales forces to bring us up to over 1,500. I don't wanna say the other area where we acquired because I don't want the other guys to know about that. We're not hiring right now, so when we hire 5 or 6 people in a key area, that means 5 or 6 people elsewhere, typically in an administrative function, go away because we got a 700-person limit in the company.
What's bad is you'd like to say we are benefiting from the malaise in the industry right now. What's bad is we had to lay off some people, not good. Screws up morale, gives you reset. Also, your sales force are 1099s, what that means is they run independent companies that you don't control. They don't work for you, they can disappear whenever they want, they often disappear anonymously, you find out later when nobody's answering the phone why. It creates unrest in the sales force, we're working on that right now 'cause a lot of our salespeople are new. They're coming in, "Man, I thought I escaped. SunPower's bragging about record this, record that.
I thought I escaped, now I'm watching. There were some minor things on the internet. Minor. SunPower stopped buying, what do you call them?
Leads.
Leads. Stopped buying leads. Yeah, right, 'cause the group that used them, we cut way back 'cause that group wasn't effective as our main sales force. SunPower stopped buying leads, and of course that's interpreted as imminent bankruptcy and it feeds the frenzy. solar industry is one of rumors, almost always unfounded. It's rare to hear the truth on the street in solar industry. So I hate that worse than I like the benefit of being able to pick and choose good people that we can wire down.
Picking and choosing has gotten us some top talent. That's why I think you're gonna see extremely strong Q2 bookings coming forward.
Got it. Super helpful. Thanks, guys.
Thank you, Derek. Our next question today comes from Gus Richard from Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thanks for taking my questions. Just curious on the bookings in the quarter. I'm assuming those are all installs. How many of those were, you know, converted from Sunder Energy sales?
Make sure I understand your question, Gus. Are you asking how many of those bookings-
First question is, I guess first part is those bookings are installs, correct?
Correct. Yes.
Then of those installs, you know, some of them I'm assuming came from Sunder sales.
Correct.
I was just curious how many of the Sunder Energy sales got converted into installs?
Let me take it. Well, the answer is these are the ones being installed now. Sunder is difficult to say No, it's not. Actually, I prepared a slide. I'll show you the slide. Probably regret it later. There it is. Okay, this is our 1099 head count, number of salesmen. This is old SunPower. These guys sold loans, not TPOs, to people in the Midwest who wanted a 5-year loan to put on solar, and they're To me, it's pretty simple. The TPO pitch is actually more attractive to an individual. This group, it's essentially three-quarters of them have gone away. We picked up Sunder, this one you're talking about, and we still have 713 of the 900 people we had there.
We picked up Ambia, that's another 300, and we picked up a company we haven't talked about publicly because we just hired them, and that's Purelight. This is another company that had got in trouble. They've got an excellent sales force. Right now we've got a rejuvenated sales force that specializes in third-party ownership sales, and lucky we did. How many are Sundar? About half. Direct old Sundar, but Eric Nielsen, the head of Sundar, president of Sundar, and now our VP of Marketing and Sales, runs all these groups. They're now mixed together. They've been mixed together for 90 days. I only had this graph created so I could look at what we acquired and what it looks like. There's your answer.
Half Sunder, but all Sunder 'cause the guy that ran Sunder runs sales for us, except for New Homes, which has got a different sell to corporate customers, and it's a very small sales group that deals with that.
Got it. Then, obviously in the news is the war in Iran. New England, for example, uses LNG to produce energy, and it's better for the guys who sell LNG to sell in Europe, and their utility prices are gonna go up as they are in a lot of places. You know, sort of how much has the change in the energy landscape, if you will, starting to incentivize consumers?
That's the biggest driving force. I mean, you asked all the questions that I put down in the appendix to save time. This is solar energy additions to the grid, so now talking about utility scale solar. There's no oil of any kind up here. We have only natural gas is being added today. First it says, "Here's solar," it says solar didn't matter enough even to be a blip on the graph until 2011. If you look at the growth of solar, it's been spectacular. Here's a bad year. Here's another bad year that lasted for 3 years before it recovered, so solar is not immune to dislocations. Battery is the second one.
Battery, if you really think about it, there's batteries in the grid where they take some power source and store it in the battery. There's also batteries on 1 million houses in the United States. They're the best kind of battery 'cause they keep that. What they do is they don't add power to the grid. What they do is they reduce the power that house requires. They store the daytime sunlight energy, let the customer use it at night to avoid the high, high-priced natural gas, the kilowatt-hour fees. Right now, if you wanted to talk about is this market good, market's great. If you wanted to talk about what does it mean when the price of utilities go up, that's great because our prices are going down, not up.
There may be a glitch due to something in the supply chain. Our prices are going down every year and have been. This whole rise here in solar is because we've become truly economically competitive. I don't run around talking green this, green that. I run around talking about, "You pay me so much a month, and your bill will go down by more than that per month for the rest of your life. What do you think?" Okay, then, let me see. By the way, I won't discuss it. This is Q1 2026 revenue. First plan, this is a positive event we wanted, our second plan, our third plan, then actuals.
I only look at this every day, and I got nervous right about there when this second plan got created there. We had drifted off just a few percent, and we started reacting right there. If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't be in the shape we are in right now to react to this crisis. Let me leave it there. If somebody asks me another question, I would love to show you that graph, but I'd rather take questions. Go ahead. I'm set. Thanks.
Thank you, Gus. We have a couple questions coming in from the web. The first one is, "With the increased bookings that you've discussed, what is SunPower doing to ramp up installs to meet this incremental demand?
Yeah, that's a great question. Well, we were in the process of hiring 86 people for our install organization to handle all that business. I came in one day and, you know, I'm the hotshot from Silicon Valley, and I said, "Wait a minute, don't hire 86 people, lay off 115 people." The market has whipped us around and the four-day workweek I discussed was designed to allow the company flexibility. The reason my graph revenue shows $130 million in Q3, and I've only guided to $96 million, 'cause that's cash flow positive and that's sort of a minimum step we have to take, is that we still have to do the ramp.
Actually I was driving over here today, I was thinking about next guy I'm going to call is Spencer Jensen, he runs our ops, and I'm going to tell Spencer he needs to take his new employee training time from his current 4 weeks, where I pay salary for 4 weeks and don't get anything, to like 1 week. We do that in sales, in our sales division, and we need to get faster. We need to be able to react faster, because I'm not going to buy it up front and spend money now on that increase that's coming later.
Thank you. We have a question, T.J., to you. Last year in July you spoke about, potentially, you know, looking to wind down and exit as our CEO in about a year, which is coming up. The question is, would Dr. Rodgers like to revise that timeline and reinsure investors of his continued attention and leadership within SunPower?
Well, one thing I kinda like is that I was retired. I was on 6 boards, so I wasn't exactly doing nothing, but I was retired for 6 months. Now I'm enjoying being back in the full war mode. That's 1. 2, I would never leave a mess behind and have them say, "Rodgers, you know, screwed it up and then took off." That won't happen. The aren't gonna win, we're gonna win, and I'm gonna be there as long as it takes.
Thank you. We have looks like one final question regarding battery attachments. "What effect do they have on the overall profit margin of your sales?
Batteries are more profitable at solar. Best job is called a grid-tied battery. That's where you don't even back up the house. You think, "Well, why would you buy a battery and not back up your house?" The answer is you buy a battery to collect cheap, free energy at noon, and then dump it into your system at night if you live in San Diego and they want $0.40 a kilowatt hour for it. A grid-tied battery is one thing hanging on your garage wall and then one hookup. It's very you can do two of them a day. Batteries are sort of an afterburner for us because to that $32,000, add another $10,000 for a battery, that's $42,000.
Thank you very much. That concludes our call for today. Dr. Rodgers, do you have any final closing remarks?
Well, yeah. I'm embarrassed by that. It is the last event that basically is tied to the string of misfortune we've had surrounding the 10-K. I frankly would like to thank our auditors for. You realize they bulked up from 10 to 17 people just to do I created the memo machine and started machine-gunning them with answers. They bulked up from 10 to 17 people and stayed with us until we tied it up. Now I'm gonna have three perfect quarters restated by next week and I've got the year of the 10-K done. Going forward I now know, as you've seen today, the details of how that happened and it's an interesting problem to manage that.
I've started to realize the reason there are so few install companies that are public is being solar, and the vagaries of having your stuff spread all over the U.S., as opposed to in a nice controlled factory. Being solar, the accounting for a public company are not incompatible, but it's difficult. One of the things I'm going to do is make our accounting a weapon that's cheap, efficient, and accurate so we can focus on the other things. I didn't talk today about our new products, I didn't talk about our new bifacial panel we just put in the boardroom to show the board last week, so that our people can focus on that, not on the error.
Thank you very much. That concludes our call. You may now disconnect.