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Menlo Electric, a Polish wholesaler of solar panels, is Europe’s fastest-growing company in this year’s FT1000 ranking, because of strong demand for Chinese-built products in its home continent and also markets including the Middle East and Africa.
Between 2020 and 2023, Menlo achieved annual compound growth of 830.8 per cent, with revenues of almost €151mn in that final year.
Menlo expanded strongly during the Covid-19 pandemic and also after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which sent Europe’s energy prices soaring and encouraged more households and companies to install their own solar power.
But, reflecting a broader trend, Menlo’s most recent earnings have suffered from a market glut, so that founder and chief executive Bartosz Majewski is forecasting for 2025 a second consecutive year of flat revenues because of lower prices.
“There is a huge issue of overcapacity and oversupply in the market, even though the demand globally is growing at a healthy pace,” he says.
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For several years, China has spearheaded the market’s growth by producing solar panels in factories that have benefited from large government subsidies and the country’s lower labour costs.
But countries including the US and India are also building more plants, in part to cut their own reliance on imports from China. This extra production could add to the oversupply problem, Majewski warns, which would mean that only European companies with strong balance sheets could be confident of surviving.
“Last year was a very challenging year for all distributors and installers in Europe, and we’ve seen a wave of bankruptcies or restructurings,” Majewski says. “Now it’s just a matter of who has the biggest war chest and deepest pockets to see them through this current period and emerge on top, while the smaller and less capitalised players drop out.”
The European Solar Manufacturing Council, an industry association, estimates that Chinese panels are now being sold at about half of their production cost in Europe, which helps explain why a dozen European manufacturers have gone bankrupt since 2023. The ESMC is calling on European policymakers to implement emergency measures to protect local producers from cheaper imports.
“Today’s unfair trade practices must be addressed to create a fair and level playing field,” says ESMC secretary-general Christoph Podewils.
Founded in 2020, Menlo has been selling mostly panels acquired from Chinese manufacturers, but Europe’s tough market conditions have recently also allowed the company to pick up surplus stock from European rivals.
“Because there is a big oversupply in Europe of panels and also batteries and inverters, we are more and more buying not directly from China but from other distributors in Europe, because frequently you get more attractive terms from distributors who previously acquired components and are now looking to offload them,” Majewski says. “It’s a moment of risk because of this decline in prices, but also of opportunity.”
He understands why European companies want more regulatory protection against cheaper rivals, but warns that using tariffs as barriers to trade could harm the solar energy market in the longer term.
Some experts also question the benefits of boosting EU subsidies. “Supporting solar manufacturing purely for the sake of being European does not present clear advantages in terms of accelerated decarbonisation or increased economic growth,” Bruegel, a Brussels-based think-tank, wrote in a report last year. “Manufacturing subsidies for the solar industry should prize innovation only.”
Menlo made its first foray abroad by selling solar components in Germany and the Netherlands. But it now also has a regional hub in Dubai and warehouses in Jordan and Iraq, which supply customers in a large array of countries, from Senegal to Pakistan. Another hub is in South Africa, which Majewski says is now becoming Menlo’s fastest-growing market.
European demand for solar power grew after Russia cut gas supplies to Europe. But Ukraine also last year became a market for Menlo, as people turned to solar installations to cope with power shortages caused by Russian attacks.
Menlo is headquartered in Warsaw but Poland now only accounts for about 20 per cent of its revenues, compared with 50 per cent in 2022 and about 90 per cent in 2021.
Majewski, 39, is a former McKinsey management consultant who switched to the energy sector, including a stint with Orlen, Poland’s state-controlled oil and gas company. He is among a dozen Polish shareholders of Menlo, all of whom have been in renewables for at least a decade.
Like others, Majewski is watching anxiously as US President Donald Trump imposes more tariffs and threatens to escalate his trade war with China.
But even if tariffs could push up prices of imports from China, Menlo is unlikely to stop selling Chinese panels to cost-conscious customers. Most of Menlo’s European customers buy Chinese panels that transit through the Dutch port of Rotterdam.
“The challenge is that clients don’t want to pay extra . . . even professionals who are investing in utility-scale solar installations don’t want to pay extra for components that are manufactured in Europe,” Majewski says.
“We’re just not competitive when it comes to costs and it’s very difficult to close that gap, not only because of the state support that Chinese manufacturers are receiving, but also partially because of the scale of what they have already deployed.”
