Solar energy group SunEnergy sees 2022 turnover double to €12M

Portugal’s SunEnergy, a specialist in solutions for producing electricity from the sun, reached a turnover of €12 million in 2022, an increase of 50% over a year earlier.

The company, with headquarters in Coimbra, went “from eight million euros [in 2021] to 12 million euros [in 2022], which represents a growth of around 50%,” the company’s director general, Raul Santos, told Lusa news agency today.

In 2022, SunEnergy installed 17,000 solar photovoltaic panels for the production of electricity from the sun in a self-consumption model, which corresponded to seven megawatts (MW) of installed power, in a total energy produced of 10 megawatt hours (MWh), which would feed more than three thousand homes.

“Our business volume has been increasing. […] This is because the type of services that we provide, particularly the installation services of self-consumption systems, have had a growing demand,” he said.

The increasing demand for this type of solution is not only seen by individuals and companies, who feel the need to reduce their energy bill, but also by local authorities, for example.

SunEnergy began its activity in 2010, a time when “this environmental concern was not so evident”.

Raul Santos explained that, in 2022, we saw a “significant increase in the cost of energy”, which resulted in an impact “not only direct, because the cost of energy rose a lot, but also indirect because it raised the cost of many goods, namely basic necessities”.

“Obviously this factor had a very significant weight in what was the growth of our business volume,” he stressed.

Besides this, another of the factors that contributed to this result is related to the issue of sustainability.

The government has allocated funds to support investments in this area, and there has been a demand from individuals who had help from the state to finance their investment.

The contribution of companies is what justifies this business volume, in 2022, since they are usually larger projects.

“The contribution that these [corporate or public] projects give to our turnover is always higher, despite the fact that they are fewer in number [than private customers]”, said Raul Santos, highlighting the importance of the SunEnergy network at a national level that allows a “much closer presence in the residential market”.

Last year, SunEnergy also started a new business area, which involves the installation and operation of charging stations for electric vehicles, which gave a strong contribution to the growth of its business volume.

The company has 22 branches, 21 of which are franchising branches, i.e. a contract whereby one party grants another the right to use its brand or patent, associated with the right to commercialise goods or services in a certain area.

The campaign “Come connect Portugal to the sun” allowed last year “to more than double our ‘franchising’ network, so the idea is, “during this year, to launch this campaign again to at least reach 30 SunEnergy branches in the country”.

Currently, the company employs, in total, 120 people throughout the country, however, the general director of the company advanced that, “so that the volume of business may increase”, it is planned to “reinforce” the team, increasing the number of workers.