Shell sells Sonnen to Tiven

Almost three years after Shell announced plans to sell its wholly owned Sonnen subsidiary and seek a new investor or at least a majority owner, the transaction has now been completed.

Neither company initially made a public announcement, although German business newspaper Handelsblatt reported the sale around two weeks ago.

Shell confirmed the completed sale of Sonnen to Tiven in response to a request from pv magazine. A company spokesperson said the transaction supports Shell’s efforts to optimize its portfolio and that Tiven and Aurelius Water Rise are well positioned to support Sonnen’s further development.

Tiven is an international asset manager and family office with an office in Munich. The office could not initially be reached by telephone at its listed number, while Tiven had not responded to an email from pv magazine at the time of publication. According to Handelsblatt, Gert Purkert is a key figure at Tiven. Purkert is Tiven’s managing director, founded Aurelius, and is a former McKinsey consultant.

Sonnen had also not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Handelsblatt reported that Tiven plans to restructure Sonnen and prepare it for resale. The newspaper was unable to obtain further details. Citing people familiar with the transaction, it reported that the purchase price was in the low hundreds of millions of euros. Shell acquired Sonnen for almost EUR 500 million in 2019.

Given Sonnen’s weak financial performance in recent years and an additional cash injection from Shell in 2024 to keep the company operating, Handelsblatt described the transaction as a billion-euro loss for Shell.

At this year’s The smarter E Europe trade show in Munich, Sonnen did not have its own booth and instead operated a “coffee corner.” Andreas Plenk, Sonnen’s chief revenue officer, told pv magazine shortly before the event that the decision reflected a change in the company’s sales and marketing strategy in Germany.

Asked about the company’s financial performance at the time, Plenk said Sonnen had grown again in 2025 despite an overall declining market and had a strong order book for 2026.

He said demand was gradually recovering after two weaker years, although many installers remained reluctant to rebuild capacity because of uncertainty over whether the recovery would continue. Sonnen’s approach, he said, was to provide greater service and closer cooperation with partners rather than maintain a strong trade-show presence.

How that strategy will evolve under Tiven remains to be seen. At present, there is no publicly available information on Sonnen’s future direction.

From pv magazine Deutschland