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A subsidiary of South Korean multinational Hanwha Group has acquired Brisbane-based entrepreneur Karl Brown’s Instyle Solar for an undisclosed sum amid heightened demand for renewable energy solutions in Australia.
Hanwha-owned Nectr has acquired the entirety of Instyle Solar, which will soon merge into its new owner with founder and 2019 Brisbane Young Entrepreneur of the Year Karl Brown to become the company’s head of the New Energy Division.
As such, the brand launched by Brown back in 2014 will soon be no more, but the founder reassures Business News Australia that all his dedicated team, except his wife, will be coming across to Nectr.
“We realised that we had quite similar goals - quite aggressive goals - in relation to energy storage, battery storage and virtual power plants,” Brown told Business News Australia.
“The agreement really aligned with what we were looking for, and we’ve had a pretty long relationship with Hanwha which also owns a panel brand called Q CELLS - the first system Instyle installed.”
Brown said the deal comes ahead of anticipated consolidation in the renewable energy space, and is contextualised by a consumer appetite for providers that can offer all-in-one generation and storage solutions.
“From a business perspective, I think the market is going to consolidate over the next couple of years, especially in that new energy space,” Brown said.
“Margins are getting tougher and you need to be able to provide a whole product offering including solar storage and virtual power plants.”
He added that he was excited about the opportunity the deal presented, not just for Instyle Solar but for what the merged entity will be able to achieve.
“One of my main ideas was that Instyle would be merged into another brand at some point - I didn’t necessarily want to have someone else owning the business,” Brown said.
“Some people like to have the legacy of it hanging around, whereas I’d prefer it to die. So that was the whole idea with the merger is that it goes into a much bigger business with much bigger budgets to achieve the goals that we want to achieve.
“They needed to get someone to achieve their goals in the new energy space and I think they bought the right company.”
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