The price talks happened at home. Over dinner, Frank Phuan's father would haggle with him about what a solar panel should cost, because the father had become the supplier to his son's company. It was a strange arrangement, and it began with an argument.
Frank graduated from Nanyang Technological University in 2001 with a materials engineering degree and walked into his father's business. His father had started selling solar panels in 1979, when almost nobody in Singapore did. Frank saw what he thought was a flaw. The firm sold panels once and the money was gone. Why not sell the electricity the panels produced and be paid every month?
What almost nobody sees from outside is the legal wrinkle that shaped it.
His father said no, and gave reasons. Singapore had little space for panels, and government incentives did not yet cover the high costs. Frank did not get his way inside the family firm. He kept the idea, and ten years later acted on it.
In 2011 he and fellow NTU graduate Lawrence Wu set up Sunseap Leasing. What almost nobody sees from outside is the legal wrinkle that shaped it. A startup could not simply sell electricity in Singapore, because it held no licence. So Sunseap leased the equipment and charged customers by how much energy they used each month. The workaround became a business model.
It was expensive. Rooftops needed big bank loans, and investors had to be persuaded that a long payback was worth waiting for. Frank has said he sometimes doubted himself, because success meant a smaller slice of his own company. He told The Peak that in this job you are always $10,000 from being a millionaire and one dollar from being broke.
He also kept Sunseap separate from his father's business, even while buying panels from it.
The turn came as Singapore's buildings began to fill with panels. By 2022 Sunseap had equipped more than 3,000 buildings, including public housing and company rooftops, with customers such as Apple among them. In February that year, EDP Renewables bought a 91 percent stake in a deal worth S$1.1 billion. Phuan stayed on as chief executive and Wu as chief financial officer.
The price he paid was a reduced share of the company he built, the very thing he had worried about years earlier.
The lesson is in the dinner-table detail. Frank's first idea was rejected by the person he most respected in the industry. He did not fight the rejection. He went around it, and the supplier relationship that began as friction stayed alive. A good idea can be stopped by an authority you love, and still be right.