Solarnative files for bankruptcy proceedings

By pv magazine Germany

By participating as an exhibitor at the Intersolar Europe trade fair at the start of the The smarter E Europe industry event in Munich last week, Solarnative had accelerated the search for a financier with an unusually open statement: they presented themselves “on a silver platter ” at the fair, given that “all potential interested parties or investors are more or less immediately on site.”

However, on Friday the company succinctly announced that its management had decided to file an application to open insolvency proceedings. “Even though the company has received fundamentally positive feedback from potential investors,” it said in justification, “it is not possible to implement new financing within the regulatory deadlines, so this step has become necessary.”

This marks the temporary end of the Kriftel near Frankfurt am Main-based company, which was founded in 2019 and set up a production facility for its microinverters in Hofheim am Taunus. Solarnative moved into the building in September 2022 and the small factory was officially opened in May last year. According to the company, it could produce up to 100,000 inverters per month at full capacity in three shifts; it planned additional production lines and a total capacity of 3 million units per year. Although the extremely compact PowerStick microinverter, which was intended, among other things, for installation in module frames, had a power of only 350 W, this would correspond to a total power of approximately 1 GW per year.

In March, the company issued a bond loan of 1.6 million euros ‘to finance further growth’, but that did not bring the hoped-for success. Now the management, consisting of Oldenkamp and his partner Julian Mattheis, has gone to bankruptcy court. According to Solarnative, the total number of affected employees is currently around 130, of which 80 are in production.