Growatt: Solar inverters, hybrid storage and batteries for homes and businesses

Overview

Growatt was set up in Shenzhen in 2011 by a group led by David Ding (Ding Yongqiang), who had worked on inverter and UPS development at Santak and then Eaton until 2009, according to Jiemian. Chinese press dates a predecessor company to 2010 (Jiemian). The company's own history records subsidiaries in Hong Kong and Australia in its first year, the US and the UK in 2013, and a Dutch subsidiary in 2018 that acts as its European headquarters. A factory in Huizhou, Guangdong began production in 2021.

Positioning

Growatt built its name on string inverters for homes and small businesses, sold through distributors and installers rather than to owners. The mix has since moved towards storage. Energy storage systems brought in RMB 3.315 billion in 2025, 63.4% of revenue, while PV inverter revenue fell from RMB 2.956 billion in 2023 to RMB 1.557 billion in 2025, according to Jiemian's reading of the 2026 prospectus. Frost & Sullivan, cited in that filing, ranks Growatt third worldwide in residential storage inverters by 2025 shipments, with about 10.2% share, first in the Americas and first in split hybrid systems where inverter and battery are separate units (Jiemian).

Independent rankings

Wood Mackenzie placed Growatt fourth in global PV inverter shipments for 2024, behind Huawei, Sungrow and Solis, in a year when no vendor outside the top two passed 5% share (PV Tech). Its separate first-half 2025 supplier ranking, which weights ESG, R&D and after-sales service as well as volume, has no Growatt in the top ten (pv magazine USA). S&P Global named it one of 12 Tier 1 PV inverter suppliers for 2026, according to the company's announcement.

Offering

Growatt's product catalogue covers most of a distributed solar system: grid-tied and hybrid inverters, off-grid inverters, batteries, commercial storage cabinets, EV chargers, meters and monitoring. Everything is sold as hardware through distributors, installers and EPC contractors; monitoring is included with the hardware and prices are not published.

Grid-tied inverters

The MIN 2500-6000TL-XH2 is a single-phase 2.5 kW to 6 kW string inverter with two MPP trackers, 98.4% maximum efficiency and a battery interface, so a home can add storage later without replacing it. The three-phase MOD and MID families extend the same approach to about 60 kW, and the MAX range covers commercial and utility plants up to the MAX 320-350K-X, a six-tracker 800 V AC inverter with 99.03% maximum efficiency. The NEO 2000M-X microinverter handles four modules at 2,000 W.

Hybrid, off-grid and storage

Hybrid inverters run from single-phase SPH units to the WIT 63-125K-XHU, a commercial three-phase hybrid with ten MPP trackers and a generator input. The SPF off-grid range, such as the SPF 6000 ES Plus, takes grid and generator inputs and runs up to six units in parallel. Batteries include the modular APX HV Battery 2.0 (5 kWh to 30 kWh, LFP, IP66) alongside low-voltage packs. For commercial sites the RISE 261H-XH combines 50 kW to 125 kW of conversion, a 261 kWh battery, EMS and UPS function in one cabinet. Balcony and plug-in storage (NEXA, NOAH, AURA 5000) and portable power stations are newer lines.

Charging, energy management and monitoring

THOR chargers cover 7 kW to 22 kW AC and 20 kW to 200 kW DC, with a mode that charges from surplus solar. The GroHomeManager-X meters the home and coordinates up to 12 devices. The monitoring platform has four parts: the ShinePhone app and ShineServer web portal for owners, ShineTools for local commissioning and firmware updates, and OSS for installers and distributors, which adds online I-V curve diagnosis.

Technology

Dataloggers and cloud

Most Growatt inverters report to its cloud through a plug-in datalogger rather than a built-in network port. The ShineWiLan-X2 serves one inverter over Wi-Fi, LAN or Bluetooth, keeps a month of data if the link drops and handles local configuration and firmware upgrade. The ShineLink-X2 gathers up to 12 devices over LAN, LoRa or optional 4G at up to 120 m. Larger plants use the ShineMaster4G-X, which polls up to 48 inverters on RS485, uploads over Ethernet or 4G, applies export limitation and publishes a list of matched meters and weather stations. Off-grid SPF units use ShineWiFi-F or ShineGPRS-F, and NEO microinverters use ShineWeLink.

Local interfaces

Growatt publishes a VPP communication protocol (version 2.01, September 2024) for third-party control over RS485 Modbus RTU. It defaults to 9600 bps with a 38400 bps option, uses function codes 03, 04, 06 and 16, and defines holding registers for export limitation, battery charge and discharge commands and reactive power. It also states that high-frequency writes are not supported, which matters for fast control loops. A separate white paper describes third-party control of a single inverter over Modbus TCP through the ShineWiLan-X2. Port roles differ by family: the MIN XH2, for example, has its own RJ45 communication port in addition to the logger socket, so the same register map is not reached the same way on every model.

Cloud API

The cloud offers an OpenAPI with regional servers (openapi, openapi-us, openapi-au and openapi-cn). The Home Assistant integration documents tokens generated from the web portal or ShinePhone, lists the MIC, MIN, MOD-XH, MID-XH and SPH series supported in token mode, and polls the cloud rather than the inverter.

Security and certification

In April 2025 CISA published advisory ICSA-25-105-04: 30 CVEs in the Growatt cloud portal up to version 3.6.0, including authorisation bypass through user-controlled keys, cross-site scripting and external control of configuration settings, with a top CVSS v4 score of 9.3. Forescout reported them as part of research into Sungrow, Growatt and SMA that described possible account and plant takeover (The Hacker News). Growatt told CISA the cloud-side issues were patched with no user action needed and that device firmware updates are applied automatically. No ISO 27001, IEC 62443 or EN 18031 evidence was found among its downloads. Electrical and grid certificates are published per product, for example an Intertek IEC 62109 CB certificate for WIT commercial hybrids, VDE-AR-N 4105 for MIN inverters and UL 1741 and IEEE 1547 for NEO microinverters.

Customers

Growatt sells almost entirely through channels. System integrators, installers and EPC contractors produced more than 90% of revenue in each year from 2023 to 2025, according to NBD. The five largest customers took 12.9% of revenue in 2024 and 23.6% in 2025, and the largest alone RMB 679 million, about 13% of 2025 revenue (Jiemian). The prospectus extracts in the press do not name them.

Distributors

Two distribution agreements are on public record. In Brazil, Bluesun renewed its agreement for 2025 with an initial forecast of about 156 MW, some 27,000 inverters, after Growatt made it a Diamond partner, its top distributor grade, in 2024. In Australia, Growatt Australia and Go Solar Group signed a memorandum of understanding in October 2024 to distribute 1 GW of inverters and 500 MWh of lithium batteries over three years. A memorandum is a statement of intent, not an order.

End users

Owners are counted through the cloud. The July 2026 S&P Global announcement gives about 4.2 million residential and commercial end users connected through the OSS platform, while the company's history page still shows more than 6 million end users connected. The two figures may count different things, and neither is broken down by country or product. Brazil has long been a large market: a Greener report placed Growatt first among residential inverter suppliers there in 2021 (PV Tech).

Growatt's case study pages load their content in the browser and name no customer sites in the page source.

Markets

Growatt reports operations in more than 190 countries and regions, with 63 sales and service locations across 30 markets, in its 2026 announcement. Its history page gives 180+ countries with installed systems and 65+ representative sites, so these counts drift between pages.

Regions

Europe was the largest market during the prospectus period, but it shrank sharply: RMB 2.397 billion of revenue in 2023 and RMB 1.361 billion in 2024. The Americas grew from RMB 837 million in 2023 to RMB 1.341 billion in 2025, while Brazil fell from RMB 358 million in 2024 to RMB 184 million in 2025 (NBD). Frost & Sullivan places Growatt first for residential storage inverters in the Americas (Jiemian). EUPD Research gave it Top Brand PV seals for 2026 for inverters in Brazil, Mexico, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa and Eastern Europe, and for storage in Brazil, the Netherlands and Belgium, according to the company.

Segments

Residential systems are the core: grid-tied and battery-ready inverters, hybrids and batteries, plus balcony storage for European flats. Off-grid inverters with generator inputs serve regions with weak grids, a line the company expanded in 2024. Commercial and industrial sites get MID, MAX and WIT inverters and RISE cabinets, and utility plants get the 1500 V MAX 320-350K-X. EV charging and the GroHome energy manager tie these together on the customer side. The company's own ranking claims centre on hybrid and split storage inverters rather than grid-tied volume (Growatt).

Company

Ownership and listing

Founder David Ding holds 63.09% before the planned listing (Jiemian). Sequoia's SCC Venture invested in 2012 and sold out for RMB 275 million in 2021; IDG invested RMB 900 million in 2022 and bought about RMB 178 million of existing shares in late 2025 and early 2026. The operating company is Shenzhen Growatt New Energy Co., Ltd., the applicant on its product certificates; the listing vehicle, Growatt Technology Co., Ltd., was incorporated in the Cayman Islands in June 2021 (Jiemian).

Growatt has tried to list several times. An A-share plan was dropped in 2021 (Jiemian). Hong Kong applications filed in June 2022 and March 2023 both passed listing hearings without an offering, and a third was filed on 16 June 2026 (EnergyTrend), with Huatai International as sole sponsor (NBD). The company is not listed.

Finances

Revenue was RMB 5.363 billion in 2023, RMB 4.476 billion in 2024 and RMB 5.233 billion in 2025. Net profit attributable to shareholders fell from RMB 843 million to RMB 20 million in 2024 before recovering to RMB 413 million, and gross margin moved from 26.3% to 20.3% to 22.5% (EnergyTrend). Cash stood at RMB 2.284 billion at the end of 2025 with a liabilities-to-assets ratio of 9.2% (Jiemian).

People, sites and disclosures

The prospectus reports 4,877 full-time employees, about RMB 181 million of unpaid social insurance and housing fund contributions over 2023 to 2025 and a maximum potential penalty of RMB 432 million (NBD). NBD also notes a 2022 media report questioning its Brazilian sales figures, to which the company published no detailed reply. Headquarters is in the Smart Green Energy Industrial Park, Yunchang Road, Hangcheng, Bao'an District (contact page); certificates from 2023 give an earlier address on Hangcheng Avenue in the same district. Production is in Huizhou and Vietnam: the CB certificate for WIT inverters names a Huizhou plant and Growatt Vietnam New Energy Co., Ltd. in the Nam Dinh Vu industrial park (Intertek Semko).