Dive Brief:
- The solar business segment of home security and automation leader Vivint has confidentially filed for its initial public offering (IPO), sources close to the matter told Reuters.
- Vivint Solar's IPO could come as soon as this fall, the sources said, but it is still too early to tell what the company's valuation will be.
Dive Insight:
Vivint Solar's move follows in the wake of SolarCity's highly successful IPO. SolarCity debuted at $8 per share in December 2012 but rose fast and was trading at $73 per share at press time, up from today's open at $70 per share.
Vivint's third-party owned solar leasing model is similar to SolarCity's and enables homeowners to buy power from solar panels installed on their rooftops at below the retail price and with little or no money down. Vivint Solar was the 2nd-biggest residential solar installer in the U.S. behind SolarCity at the end of Q3 2013, according to Greentech Media. Vivint is owned by Blackstone Group after its $2 billion acquisition of the company in 2012.
The growth in market share of the big solar installers is slowly but surely paving the way for the corporatization of residential solar in the U.S., Shayle Kann, senior vice president of research at GTM Research, said at the Grid Edge conference in late June.
“The trend line is toward the bigger players,” Kann said, adding that Solarcity did over 25% of all U.S. residential installs in 2013. “There’s a real question here, that I don’t have the answer to, over the long term about whether the smaller local residential solar installers are going to be able to compete with the big guys.”
