Former Huawei executives team up to enter the energy storage market?

Photovoltaic Information | PV-info

The four characters “遥遥领先” (far ahead of the competition) are deeply ingrained in Huawei's brand DNA. A group of entrepreneurs from Huawei are embarking on entrepreneurial journeys focusing on the integrated photovoltaics and energy storage market. PV-info has compiled information on four energy storage companies founded by former Huawei executives, as follows:

Sig Energy (Established May 24, 2022)

Founder Xu Yingtong, former president of Huawei's smart photovoltaic business, led the key battle that propelled Huawei inverters to the top of the global market. Just two months after leaving, he founded Sig Energy, focusing on AI-enabled distributed energy storage systems.

In less than three years, the company achieved an industry miracle: completing 6 rounds of financing exceeding 700 million yuan, with a valuation of 4.4 billion yuan; revenue exceeding 700 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2024, achieving a 24.3% market share in the global stackable integrated photovoltaic and energy storage system market, securing the top spot in the industry. Relying on the Huawei team's deep understanding of overseas channels (Europe contributes 65% of revenue), Sig quickly seized market share, but fierce competition and periodic losses (534 million yuan in losses in the first three quarters of 2024) remain real challenges to its pursuit of listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Polaris Cloud Energy (Established August 21, 2023)

Founder Shi Yaohong, former vice president of Huawei and president of Huawei Cloud & Computing China, brings his extensive cloud computing background to Polaris Cloud Energy. The company's core strategy is "cloud-energy integration," leveraging Huawei's cloud technology advantages in the energy management field to build an intelligent photovoltaic and energy storage cloud platform.

Through data-driven optimization of energy scheduling, improving photovoltaic prediction accuracy and energy storage response efficiency, it helps industrial and commercial users achieve refined energy cost control. Its solutions reuse Huawei's technological accumulation in digital twins and AI algorithms, focusing on the rapidly growing industrial and commercial energy storage market, gradually forming a differentiated competitive advantage of "software-defined energy."

Douneng Technology (Established September 20, 2023)

Founder Chen Yongqiang, former president of the Digital Energy Sales and Service Department of Huawei Enterprise BG, has a deep understanding of the pain points in the global energy market. Douneng Technology positions itself as a "digital energy service provider," focusing on providing full-lifecycle optimization services for large power plants and industrial parks.

Drawing on Huawei's experience in system integration projects such as the 2.2GW global largest photovoltaic park in Gonghe County, Qinghai Province, and the 1.3GWh microgrid project in Saudi Arabia's Red Sea, the company has developed an intelligent operation and maintenance platform to achieve component-level fault diagnosis (6 times improvement in accuracy) and automatic calibration of energy storage systems, significantly reducing operation and maintenance costs (12,000 yuan per year in calibration costs for a single 200kWh energy storage system).

Mowa New Energy (Established January 11, 2024)

Founder Chen Guoguang, president of Huawei's Digital Energy Smart Photovoltaic Product Line. Targeting the industrial and commercial energy storage market, it launched highly adaptable integrated photovoltaic and energy storage products. Mowa reuses Huawei's intelligent string-type energy storage architecture's "one package, one optimization, one cluster, one management" concept, using power electronics technology to solve lithium battery consistency issues and combining quadruple active safety protection (such as top explosion-proof design) to ensure system safety.

Although the company was established most recently, it quickly entered the industrial park photovoltaic and energy storage charging scenario based on its deep understanding of Huawei's modular design and technical standards, aiming to replicate Huawei's successful experience in projects such as the Xin Cheng Rui 8MWh energy storage power station.

While these four companies have different paths, they all share Huawei's technological DNA. They are both an extension of Huawei's digital energy capabilities and use more flexible mechanisms to meet the needs of market segmentation. So, can this "Huawei army" create a "遥遥领先" (far ahead of the competition) in the photovoltaic industry?