SunPower Class B Shares Ready to Rise?

Editor's note: This was published by Greentech Media last week. It is being republished for TheStreet.com readers, along with a related video from TheStreet.com TV.

Written by Jennifer Kho

Shares of SunPower Corp. (SPWR Quote), newly issued from former parent company Cypress Semiconductor (CY Quote), have begun to trickle onto the market this week [Sept. 22-26].

Traded as "SPWRV," the Class B shares come with eight times the voting rights of the regular Class A shares trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "SPWR."

But despite their higher voting power, they have been trading at a lower price than the Class A shares -- although the gap appears to be narrowing.

The Class B shares closed at $76.91 per share Tuesday [Sept. 23], 12.1 percent less than the price of $87.51 per Class A share, and grew to $87.86 per share Thursday [Sept. 25], or 7.4 percent less than $94.84 per Class A share.

"They are coming together; the gap is closing," Stephen Simko, an equity analyst at Morningstar, said Thursday.

The difference then widened slightly Friday [Sept. 26] as both stocks fell, possibly on the news that the U.S. House of Representatives passed a different renewable-energy tax-credit bill than the one approved by the Senate, which effectively means that the credits have not made it through Congress. Class B shares were worth $75.69 per share Friday, 9 percent less than $83.16 per share for Class A holdings.

Of course, it's hard to draw conclusions from the price gap, considering the low trading volume -- the Class B shares saw a trading volume of 518,765 Friday, which was more than six times the volume of 3.2 million for Class A shares -- and the uncertainty around the number of shares available at this point.