Nextpower Inc.

Overview

Nextpower, formerly Nextracker, is the world's largest solar tracker manufacturer, holding the top global market share for eleven consecutive years with more than 160 GW shipped since founding. It is headquartered in Fremont, California and was founded in 2013 by Dan Shugar, a veteran of SunPower and Solaria, alongside Marco Garcia, Alex Au, and Ty Jagerson. The founders built the company around a specific architectural choice, the independent-row tracker, which addressed the reliability and terrain limitations of earlier linked-row systems.

On November 12, 2025, the company renamed itself from Nextracker to Nextpower, a full legal name change through an amended Delaware certificate of incorporation, to reflect expansion beyond trackers into a broader portfolio of utility-scale solar components: electrical balance of systems, steel foundations, module frames, and now power conversion equipment. The core tracker business remains dominant, and the strategic direction is toward supplying a larger share of everything a utility-scale solar plant requires.

Products & technology

Founding & corporate history

Dan Shugar founded Nextracker in 2013 as a spinout from Solaria, drawing on his experience building SunPower's systems business. The team addressed a specific problem: first-generation trackers linked rows mechanically and required communication cables trenched across a field, which added installation cost and created a single point of failure that could take down large sections of a plant. The NX Horizon's independent-row, self-powered architecture was the answer.

In 2015, contract manufacturer Flex Ltd. acquired Nextracker for $330 million. The Flex relationship gave it access to a global manufacturing and supply chain network without building one, a significant advantage for a hardware company scaling quickly across geographies. Under Flex, Nextracker expanded into Australia, India, and Latin America and became the world's top tracker supplier by shipped GW in 2016. By 2019 it had shipped 20 GW cumulatively.

Nextracker went public in February 2023 in what was then the largest U.S. clean energy IPO of the year, raising approximately $638 million. Flex retained a significant stake through the IPO and distributed its remaining shares to Flex shareholders in a spin-off completed in January 2024, at which point Nextracker became fully independent. The November 2025 rebrand followed the acquisitions that expanded the portfolio beyond trackers for the first time since founding.

Financial performance

The fiscal year ends March 31. FY2026 revenue was $3.56 billion, up 20% from $2.96 billion and well above original guidance of $3.2 billion to $3.4 billion. Adjusted EBITDA reached $853.7 million, a 24.0% margin, up from $777 million. GAAP net income was $585.9 million, or $3.84 diluted, with adjusted diluted EPS of $4.50. Adjusted free cash flow was $513.6 million, the balance sheet held $1.1 billion in cash at year-end, and the company achieved an investment-grade credit rating during the year.

The backlog gives unusual forward visibility for a hardware company, ending FY2026 at a record above $5.25 billion after a record bookings quarter in Q4, covering well over a year of revenue at the current run rate. FY2027 guidance, raised in May 2026, calls for revenue of $3.8 billion to $4.1 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $825 million to $900 million, and adjusted diluted EPS of $4.21 to $4.59, absorbing roughly $50 million of incremental cost to accelerate the inverter entry. The company guides to more than 40% growth in the non-tracker business in FY2027, taking it to about 15% of revenue, on the way to FY2030 targets set at the November 2025 capital markets day of $4.8 billion to $5.6 billion in revenue with roughly one-third from non-tracker products and services.

Competitive position

The global tracker market had its strongest year on record in calendar 2025, with shipments of 134 GWdc, up 19%, according to Wood Mackenzie. Nextpower ranked first for the eleventh consecutive year with roughly 40 GWdc shipped and about 30% global share, and extended its U.S. share above 50%. GameChange, Arctech, Array Technologies, and PVHardware rounded out the global top five, and Nextpower, Array, and GameChange together hold roughly 90% of the U.S. market. Chinese competitors, led by Arctech, are price-competitive outside the U.S. and have been gaining global share, while domestic U.S. dynamics have favored American suppliers. In June 2026, Nextpower filed a patent lawsuit against GameChange in Delaware federal court, alleging its tracker systems and software infringe three patents covering self-powered tracker architecture and TrueCapture-style energy optimization; GameChange has said it will vigorously defend itself.

Array Technologies has pursued a different integration strategy, securing domestic torque-tube steel through supply partnerships and building its own U.S. tracker factory to control steel cost and qualify for domestic-content incentives. Nextpower's approach, adding electronics, software, and now power conversion, bets that differentiation comes from the intelligence and integration of the system rather than the cost of the steel. The two strategies reflect different views of where durable margin sits in this industry.

Strategy & outlook

The rebrand signals a specific thesis: that utility-scale developers will increasingly prefer buying an integrated system from fewer suppliers rather than separately procuring trackers, eBOS, foundations, and inverters. Owning all those lines lets Nextpower offer a coordinated solution that installs faster, has fewer integration failure modes, and gives the developer a single accountability relationship. The inverter acquisition accelerates this by adding the most complex and highest-value component in the power conversion stack.

The demand backdrop supports continued growth. Global solar capacity additions have exceeded every prior forecast, and the AI data center buildout is accelerating U.S. utility-scale solar procurement by major technology companies. Backlog visibility, geographic diversification across North America, Latin America, Australia, India, and Europe, and product breadth across terrain types and hail zones position the company broadly across the market.

Key considerations

The platform expansion creates execution risk the tracker-only business did not carry. Inverters are a competitive, technically complex market with established players including SMA, SolarEdge, Sungrow, and Huawei, who have decades of product development and field experience. Entering through a relatively small acquisition of Zigor and Apex Power, which had not closed as of early July 2026, gives Nextpower a product to sell, and building share in power conversion requires a track record it does not have. Inverter margins are also not obviously better than tracker margins, which are already strong. The June 2026 Zimmermann deal adds further integration workload in a new geography at the same time.

Tariff policy on imported steel is a persistent cost variable. Torque tubes and structural steel are a large share of product cost, so U.S. steel tariffs feed directly into manufacturing economics. Nextpower manages this through its Flex-era supply chain relationships and domestic sourcing, and booked some tariff cost recoveries from customers in Q4 FY2026, and significant tariff moves in either direction flow through to project economics and potentially to demand.

Tracker market growth is ultimately tied to the pace of utility-scale solar additions. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July 2025 accelerated the phase-out of federal tax credits for new solar. Management has said the law resolved much of the tax-credit uncertainty, that its deep backlog and flexible U.S. supply chain leave it well positioned, and, as of May 2026, that safe-harbor deadlines are not a bottleneck for the industry at this time. Record bookings since suggest demand has held, and the post-safe-harbor project economics of the early 2030s remain the open question for the whole sector. International diversification, extended by the Zimmermann acquisition, provides some buffer, though management guides to a U.S. revenue mix in the high-70s percent for FY2027.

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