Lesedi Solar Care Business Plan — Executive Summary

Lesedi Solar Care (Pty) Ltd is a South African operations and maintenance business serving the country’s rapidly expanding solar photovoltaic fleet. The…

Executive Summary

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Lesedi Solar Care (Pty) Ltd is a South African operations and maintenance business serving the country’s rapidly expanding solar photovoltaic fleet. The Company provides full-service O&M, specialist water-efficient panel cleaning, diagnostic inspection and a performance analytics platform, LumenIQ, to utility-scale independent power producers and large commercial and industrial asset owners.

The business exists because of a measurable, recurring physical problem. Solar modules in South Africa’s highest-irradiance regions accumulate dust, agricultural particulate and bird soiling that suppress energy yield by between 3% and 8% annually, and materially more during dry-season peaks in the Northern Cape. That lost energy is lost revenue for the asset owner, every day, and it compounds. Cleaning recovers it. The economics are unusually easy for a client to verify: the service pays for itself out of energy the client was already failing to harvest.

R58.0m

Total funding

R38.0m

Equity raise

1,250 MW

Under management by Y5

26%

Year-5 EBITDA margin

Figure 1. Soiling suppresses yield continuously; a disciplined cleaning cycle recovers it.

1.1 Why now

Two market shifts make this the right moment. First, the utility-scale fleet built under early renewable procurement rounds is now eight to fourteen years old and rolling off original construction-bundled service agreements into competitive re-tender, a book of contracts changing hands for the first time. Second, the post-load-shedding surge in commercial rooftop installations has created a large, fragmented and badly under-serviced base whose owners are only now discovering that an unmaintained array underperforms the financial model that justified it.

The scale of that second shift is now documented. Installed rooftop capacity in South Africa passed 8.3 GW in 2026, more than all operational solar contracted under the government’s procurement programmes combined, within a total installed solar fleet exceeding 10.2 GW. Critically, rooftop installation continued after load-shedding effectively ended in early 2024, which indicates a structurally durable base rather than a crisis-driven spike. Every one of those megawatts requires servicing for the next twenty-five years.

Figure 2. South Africa’s installed solar fleet — Lesedi’s addressable base.

1.2 The proposition

Lesedi is raising R38 million of equity alongside R14 million of asset finance and a R6 million working capital facility, R58 million in total, to build a national field platform of three regional depots, a robotic cleaning fleet and the LumenIQ analytics layer. The base case reaches 1,250 MW under management and R139 million of revenue by year five at a 26% EBITDA margin.

Figure 3. Revenue, EBITDA and margin expansion.

R million	Y1	Y2	Y3	Y4	Y5	Y6	Y7
MW under management	240	450	700	950	1250	1560	1880
Revenue	27.0	50.0	78.0	105.0	139.0	175.1	211.5
Gross profit	9.4	19.0	30.4	42.0	57.0	72.7	88.8
EBITDA	3.2	9.5	17.9	26.2	36.1	46.9	57.9
EBITDA margin	11.9%	19%	22.9%	25%	26%	26.8%	27.4%
Net profit	(2.5)	1.7	6.9	12.3	18.6	25.6	32.9

1.3 Why this business can win

Recurring, contracted revenue. Three- to five-year O&M agreements with annual escalation; 88% of year-3 revenue is contracted or under renewal at the start of the year.
A verifiable value proposition. Recovered yield is metered. Clients see the return in their own generation data, which shortens sales cycles and protects pricing, the sale becomes a data conversation rather than a price negotiation.
Water as the strategic wedge. The best solar resource sits in the driest districts. Robotic and low-volume methods use roughly 90% less water than conventional wet cleaning, a licence-to-operate advantage, not a marketing line.
Asset-light and cash-generative. No generation assets, no project finance, no grid risk. Capital goes into revenue-producing field equipment with five- to seven-year lives.
Level 1 empowerment. 59% Black ownership including worker and community trusts, directly material to IPP clients’ own enterprise and supplier development scorecards, and not replicable by an international incumbent through subcontracting.

1.4 Independent findings in summary

Key findingFour findings, none of which undermines the model's integrity

First, the stated Year-5 service mix does not reconcile to the stated contract prices and capacity: cleaning at 33% of revenue divided by R38,000 per megawatt implies 1,208 MW of cleaning contracts alone, which together with the full-service share implies roughly 1,655 MW against a stated 1,250 MW. Second, the stated 3.9× return multiple does not reconcile to the stated exit assumption, on 6.0× Year-5 EBITDA plus net cash, whole-equity value is approximately R240 million, or 6.3× the R38 million raised, and the Plan does not disclose what shareholding R38 million purchases, which is the single most important omission for an incoming investor. Third, the R6 million working capital facility is sized for the early years; by Year 5 net working capital reaches R12.3 million and by Year 7 R18.8 million. Fourth, the market sizing appears to over-weight utility-scale and under-weight commercial rooftop relative to the actual installed base. Each is quantified in Sections 15 to 18.

1.5 What testing confirmed

StrengthThe downside solvency claim holds

The Plan asserts that in the downside, a business that wins only 70% of its target contracts, prices 10% lower and never reaches full route density, the investment remains solvent throughout, funded by the initial raise without further equity. Independent reconstruction of that case confirms it. Reproducing the stated downside parameters produces Year-5 EBITDA of R16.3 million, matching the Plan exactly, and a cash trajectory that troughs at approximately R10 million in year four before recovering. No additional equity is required. That asymmetry, where the failure mode is slower growth rather than capital loss, is the strongest single feature of the investment case, and it survives independent testing.