Founded by Arowana in August 2014, VivoPower International PLC is a NASDAQ- listed sustainable energy solutions company with operations in the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada. VivoPower is a certified B Corporation and was recognised as one of the top 50 impact companies in the world by the Real Leaders Impact Awards.

Having started its life focussed on developing small solar power systems in Australia, VivoPower today is a NASDAQ-listed and London-headquartered group that provides ruggedised electric vehicles, battery technology, solar energy systems, and critical power solutions to a global customer base. Its core purpose is to deliver sustainable energy solutions (SES) to its customers and help them achieve net zero targets.

VivoPower scaled rapidly after inception and overcame many challenges to successfully IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange in December 2016. Arowana remains the largest shareholder in VivoPower, and a number of its key executives serve on the board and operate as part of the management team.

The entrepreneurs among us will appreciate that no business is without its challenges, and VivoPower has been no different, experiencing a number of seemingly insurmountable problems before and after its IPO. Pre-IPO, these included: the demise of the largest solar company in the world, SunEdison (which turned solar from a hot sector on the NASDAQ into an unpopular sector making capital-raising difficult); Brexit volatility; the last-minute withdrawal of a solar contractor (which threatened the build of our first US solar plant); and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States (which made various stakeholders nervous about renewable energy policy and future opportunities). Post-IPO, VivoPower had to contend with Trump’s renewable energy tariffs, which made solar development less profitable in the US, a badly underperforming stock price as well as internal management culture issues, and consequential legal cases. By the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020, these issues had left VivoPower with virtually no cash, a long list of overdue creditors, and a market capitalisation of less than US$10m.

In March 2020, led by Arowana’s founder, Kevin Chin, a core team of VivoPower and on secondment Arowana executives embarked on a no-fail hyperturnaround mission codenamed “Operation Sunfish”. Through a combination of sheer grit, crisis-inspired creativity and some luck, the mission thankfully succeeded, ending with an oversubscribed capital raising of US$29m in October 2020. By this point, VivoPower’s market capitalisation had achieved a high in excess of US$300m, enabling VivoPower to complete a transformational strategic pivot and acquire an electric vehicle company called Tembo. The hyperturnaround mission was recognised by the Turnaround Management Association (TMA) as the Transaction of the Year for the sub $50m revenue category.

The acquisition of Tembo has created the springboard for VivoPower to accelerate the delivery of its three-pronged sustainable energy solutions (SES) which encompasses:

- Design and development of ruggedised electric vehicles, delivered to customers via sale or lease financing;
- EV battery repair, maintenance, and second life applications; and
- Critical electrical power retrofits on-site (eg. warehouses and depots) to optimise EV battery charging.

When VivoPower was established, it embarked on a strategy to develop small-scale distributed generation solar systems in Australia. However, the team quickly realised the addressable market was too small and moved to exploring markets in Southeast Asia and the United States. Following an immersive search over a six-month period, VivoPower landed two utility-scale solar projects to develop in North Carolina (NC-31 and NC-47). Over a 15-month period to March 2017, VivoPower successfully developed, operated, and sold 91MW worth of projects in the US— enough to power over 21,000 homes. In April 2017, VivoPower entered into a joint venture to develop a 1.8GW portfolio of solar projects in the US, making it one of the largest solar developers in North America at the time. Meanwhile, in Australia, VivoPower developed and built solar projects of all sizes, including the 600 kW Amaroo Solar Project, which is the country’s largest solar structure on a school rooftop; a 3.6 MW solar facility at Cubbie Station, the largest irrigation property in the Southern Hemisphere; and more than 80 solar rooftop structures for small-and-medium business customers.

Since the strategic pivot to sustainable energy solutions, VivoPower has exited all of its solar development activities in Australia. It has also taken control of its US solar joint venture as part of a legal settlement, renamed it to Caret LLC, and is executing on a power-to-x strategy to maximise value.

By virtue of the above experience, VivoPower’s expertise in this area today also extends into designing and developing on-site solar generation systems and microgrids to help power customers’ electric vehicle fleets and critical power infrastructure.

Through its wholly-owned Australian subsidiary Kenshaw, VivoPower provides critical energy infrastructure generation and distribution solutions including the design, supply, installation and maintenance of power and control systems to a customer base in excess of 700 active government, mining, utilities, infrastructure and industrial customers.

Structural and cyclical factors have created a strong operating environment for VivoPower's critical power services business, particularly the strong growth in infrastructure investment, buoyant conditions for the mining sector, and increasing demand for data centres and solar farms.

Kenshaw is owned by VivoPower through a holding company called Aevitas, which was formed in 2013 and acquired by VivoPower in December 2016.