The business path of Carlota Pi, one of the founders of Holaluz, an electrical company that has surpassed 300,000 customers, has begun to encounter too many obstacles. The marketing company, which was a catalyst within the sector, had great recognition for its brand in the figure of Pi. Awards for its work, rivers of ink about the company’s emergence into the energy market… the praise from a decade ago has now become a statement by its own workers, and sectoral doubts that Holaluz will return to have the same shine as years ago. In the summer of 2018, at the beginning of July, when the heat begins to enter the body without warning, Carlota Pi posed with Francisco Riberas as winners of the AMD Awards granted by this organization of managers. The photo with the president of Gestamp and director of Telefónica, a regular on the ‘Forbes list’, was a symbol of what Carlota Pi represented at that time. Maximum exposure to the media, an excessive growth of clients in Holaluz, although yes, always with a very ‘startup’ trend; that is, making progress, but with a financial balance that always promises more than it delivers. Standard Related News If Naturgy plans to invest up to 900 million in 30 biomethane plants Raúl Masa The plants will be operational before 2030 and will be key in The new strategic plan that will be released in FebruaryThe company will have a turnover of close to 1,000 million euros in 2022. It was the time of the splendor of solar self-consumption. The energy price crisis invited people to opt for having their own solar panels. Holaluz was sized accordingly. Maybe too much. He hired, he invested, he continued to spend on marketing. The so-called ‘rooftop revolution’ was underway, and it should not be stopped. Electricity prices were skyrocketing. Something that years ago was used to steal clients from large companies, was now different. The Spaniards earned a master’s degree in the evolution of the megawatt hour. It seemed that investing in self-consumption was a good bet. But something didn’t quite go right. Furthermore, in this context, Holaluz wanted to expand the perimeter of its business. In 2023, Carlota Pi signed an agreement with Tesla, the large automotive company controlled by Elon Musk, with the aim of marketing and installing the home batteries of Donald Trump’s now close friend. The objective was to introduce electric vehicles into this solar equation and, ultimately, provide greater value to customers. It was also intended to gain a greater presence within the sector itself. Goodbye, light But everything blew up in the spring of 2024. Carlota Pi, until that moment, was one of the images of success in the Spanish entrepreneurial system. Furthermore, he had achieved it in a sector such as the energy sector, where he faced colossi such as Iberdrola or Naturgy. Precisely this second segment, that of gas, was the one that set off the alarm that after the crisis derived from Ukraine nothing would be the same. If electricity prices had generated a business in solar self-consumption, that same crisis had forced it to give in its gas customer portfolio. But the real blow came in April 2024 when in the presentation of its financial balance, along with some heavy losses, Holaluz put a cursed word in black on white: “pre-bankruptcy of creditors.” It was a reference to the need for financing and that, if it did not end up going well, it would be a commercial figure that they would have to activate. Since then, and with problems with shareholders, the company has been looking for financing to move forward. During this time, in addition, part of the reality has emerged of how the company has carried out improvable management in recent quarters. Holaluz carried out a regulation file (ERE) in 2023, but before that it had carried out a high number of hires. The workforce at the end of 2021 was 354 workers. A year later the figure rose to 752 employees, of which 402 belong to the ‘solar’ team, according to the company’s financial reports. As ABC has learned from industry sources, this strong commitment to having its own staff was very risky. It was an immediate benefit compared to having to subcontract personnel to carry out self-consumption installations, but it was an anomaly within the business. Holaluz justified it by explaining that “scalability is essential in the business of commercializing electrical energy, which is why which the company is committed to attracting human capital, and more particularly technological profiles. Another of the pillars of the ‘rooftop revolution’ was communication. As stated in the consolidated financial report, in 2023 spending on ‘Advertising, propaganda and public relations’ amounted to 24.8 million euros. The company itself explained that this is a cost containment with respect to the 25.3 million it spent in 2022. To put an end to the problems, for weeks Holaluz workers have been demonstrating against the company for some cuts they have suffered.
#Rise #fall #Carlota #Holaluz #agreements #Elon #Musk #rebellion #staff
