SunPower Corp. announced that revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2005, was $29.3 million, up 34% from the prior quarter's revenue of $21.9 million and up 523% from the year-ago fourth quarter combined revenue of $4.7 million. The Company's fiscal 2005 revenue was $78.7 million.
"We are pleased to report very solid results from our initial quarter as a public company. Our operations team continued to demonstrate their ability to rapidly ramp capacity by starting up our second 25-megawatt solar cell line ahead of plan, stated Tom Werner, SunPower CEO. "Line 2 contributed meaningfully to our Q4 results and achieved productivity metrics in some areas that already rivaled Line 1."
"The outlook for the first quarter of 2006 is equally exciting", continued Werner. "Our operations team will continue to ramp Line 2 and also start up Line 3. We expect that this incremental capacity will allow us to achieve another significant quarter-on-quarter top line revenue increase to between $38 and $40 million, with expected Q1 non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.02 to $0.04. As we continue to build out SPML's capacity over the course of the year, we expect 2006 revenues in excess of $210 million."
Werner added, "It is well known that the availability and price of poly-silicon raw material are critical challenges in today's solar power business. We believe that SunPower's high-efficiency technology gives us a clear advantage in this environment by allowing us to produce more watts of solar power per kilogram of poly-silicon raw material than our competitors. In Q4 we implemented improvements on our manufacturing process to further increase our silicon utilization efficiency and we will continue to push hard for yet more progress on this metric over the course of 2006."
GAAP net loss for the 2005 fourth quarter was $0.6 million, or $0.01 loss per share, compared to last quarter's net loss of $1.6 million or $0.06 loss per share and the year-ago fourth quarter combined net loss of $10.4 million.
On a non-GAAP basis -- excluding amortization of intangible assets and stock-based compensation -- the 2005 fourth quarter net income was $1.5 million or diluted earnings per share of $0.02, compared to the prior quarter's breakeven results and the year-ago fourth quarter combined net loss of $9.1 million.
During the just-completed quarter, the company completed its Initial Public Offering, selling 8.83 million shares of common stock raising net proceeds of $145.6 million. SunPower priced its shares at the top end of its announced range.
