This morning two energy initial public offerings (IPOs) made their debut. One of them was green and one of them was brown. Unfortunately, the mainstream media missed the boat by characterizing the brown company as successful and the green one as a miss. We don’t see it that way.
The brown company is PBF Energy, a Blackstone-backed rollup of three refiners that were divested by Valero and Sunoco. The company, like many refiners, is having its day in the sun as refining margins are currently wide due to technical market issues relating to the relative prices of Brent and WTI crudes. The bottom line, however, is that demand for gasoline and diesel is unlikely to grow as CAFE fuel economy standards continue to tighten.
The second company, SolarCity, has been posting over 100% annual growth in solar installations since 2009. Additionally, the company has been a leader in residential energy efficiency and EV charging stations, and has even begun to roll out a residential energy storage solution.
Unfortunately, SolarCity’s business model requires some complex accounting that ultimately hurt their valuation. The vast majority of their solar photovoltaic (PV) installations are executed as leases or similar structures to take advantage of various tax incentives. This reduces the accountants’ formulation of revenue, and also makes the business unprofitable. As an example, imagine a solar company can construct a solar system for $16k and sell it for $20k, with $3k of overhead. They would result in $20k of revenue, $4k of gross profit and $1k of net income. Do that enough times and you have a pretty good business.
As a lease, however, they only recognize revenue as it is received through annual lease payments, which might be around $1500. Assuming the $3k of overhead remains, then the company would post a loss of $1500 in year one. Economically, this might be the same or better business, but through the eyes of an accountant, this is a harder pill to swallow as the profits must be realized over the long term of the lease.
SolarCity is a new concept for the public market: it is essentially the first high-growth cleantech company that relies on an equipment leasing model. Despite projected revenue growth, the solar IPO struggled to generate demand due to this complex accounting and priced well below the expected range. On the other hand, PBF priced at the middle of its range, and sold more shares than originally expected. Longer term, however, my money would be on the company with the meteoric growth rate. So far today, the market seems to agree. SolarCity is up 48% from its pricing while PBF Energy has gained less than 1%.