Two makers hold a number one for the same half-year, and both are quoting a tracker accurately.
Fox ESS announced in August that it led global residential storage shipments for the first half of 2026. Sigenergy announced in September that it ranked first in the same market over the same half-year. Neither is misreporting its source. They are reading two different trackers, and the two trackers disagree by more than the makers do.
What each announcement says
On , in a release datelined Wenzhou, Fox ESS stated that it "led the global top five residential storage suppliers for the period", citing InfoLink Consulting. Source: Fox ESS release via PRNewswire, 21 August 2026.
On , Sigenergy stated that it ranked number one globally by MWh shipments in S&P Global Energy's Residential Energy Storage Market Tracker for H1 2026, with a 14 per cent market share. Source: Sigenergy release via GlobeNewswire, 2 September 2026.
Both are scored on this site. Neither claim is disputed here, and neither release misstates what its tracker found.
How the same period produced two first places
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InfoLink publishes its half-year residential figuresGlobal residential energy storage shipments of 39.07 GWh in 1H26, up 137.67 per cent year on year, with Fox ESS, Sigenergy, Deye, Huawei and GoodWe named as the five largest suppliers.
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Fox ESS announces a first placeA release from Wenzhou states that Fox ESS led the global top five residential storage suppliers for the period, citing InfoLink. The same release cites Frost & Sullivan for a 10.5 per cent share in 2025 and states that Fox ESS held a 2025 number one ranking from S&P Global Energy.
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Sigenergy announces a first placeA release states that Sigenergy ranked number one globally by MWh shipments in S&P Global Energy's Residential Energy Storage Market Tracker for H1 2026, with a 14 per cent market share.
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The claim travels without its trackerSigenergy's customer newsletter quotes founder and chief executive Tony Xu saying the company ranked number one in the global residential energy storage market by market share. No tracker, metric or dataset is named.
What the published figures show
InfoLink published its half-year residential figures on : global residential energy storage shipments reached 39.07 GWh in 1H26, up 137.67 per cent year on year, with Fox ESS, Sigenergy, Deye, Huawei and GoodWe as the five largest suppliers. Source: InfoLink Consulting, 1H26 global ESS shipment rankings, published 14 August 2026.
Shares from the same database, reported by ESS News on 16 September 2026 and by pv magazine the following day, put Fox ESS at 11.5 per cent, Sigenergy at 11.3 and Deye at 11.0. First and second are separated by 0.2 percentage points. First and third are separated by 0.5. Sources: ESS News, 16 September 2026; pv magazine, 17 September 2026, both reporting InfoLink Consulting.
The share reported for first place on the other tracker is 14 per cent. That is 2.5 percentage points above what InfoLink reports for the supplier it places first, which is five times the spread across InfoLink's first three. Two trackers covering the same market over the same half-year differ more in what they attribute to first place than the first three suppliers differ from each other on either one. Whatever the disagreement is about, it is not who is marginally ahead of whom.
The order moves inside one tracker as well
InfoLink's first-quarter figures, published , recorded 20.67 GWh of residential shipments, up 392.17 per cent year on year and 138.42 per cent quarter on quarter, with Sigenergy, Fox ESS, Deye, Tesla and Huawei as the five largest. Sigenergy was first at the quarter and Fox ESS first at the half, on one firm's numbers, four months apart. Source: InfoLink Consulting, 1Q26 global ESS shipment rankings, published 22 May 2026.
Both makers have also cited the same firm. The Fox ESS release states that its InfoLink result followed an earlier 2025 number one ranking from S&P Global Energy. Sigenergy attributes its H1 2026 first place to that firm's tracker. Those are different periods, and they are not in conflict. A first place is a statement about a window as much as about a company.
The two rankings are not equally checkable
InfoLink publishes its residential shipment ranking on its own site, and the trade press reports it citing InfoLink by name. A reader who wants to see where the figure came from can go and look.
S&P Global's clean energy technology research is sold as a subscription package, Clean Energy Technology Market Insights, from S&P Global Commodity Insights. That product page carries no public supplier rankings, read . The 14 per cent figure therefore reaches a reader only through the release of the maker it places first. Source: S&P Global Commodity Insights, Clean Energy Technology Market Insights product page, read 20 September 2026.
That is a statement about what can be verified, not about whether the figure is correct. A subscription tracker is a normal commercial product and its being paid for says nothing about its quality. It does mean that one of these two rankings can be traced to its publisher by anyone and the other cannot.
What is lost between the release and the newsletter
The 2 September release names its tracker, its metric and its period. Sigenergy's customer newsletter of quotes founder and chief executive Tony Xu: "In the first half of 2026, Sigenergy ranked No. 1 in the global residential energy storage market by market share." The tracker is gone, the metric is gone, and what was a finding from one database arrives as a fact about the market. Source: Sigenergy customer newsletter, 18 September 2026.
Nothing in that sentence is false. The decay is in the attribution, not the claim, and it is the ordinary way a sourced number becomes an unsourced one as it travels from a wire release into marketing copy. A reader meeting it in the newsletter has no way back to the dataset.
Four things a shipment ranking needs before it can be checked
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01
The tracker
Which firm's database produced it. Two databases counting the same half-year returned two different first places, so the ranking is a property of the dataset before it is a property of the market.
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02
The metric
Shipments, installations, revenue or capacity additions are different quantities. InfoLink's 39.07 GWh for the half-year counts shipments; its 46.1 GWh figure for 2026 is a projection of capacity additions. The two do not sit on the same scale and must not be compared.
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03
The period
A quarter, a half-year and a full year produce different orders. Both makers have cited S&P Global Energy, for 2025 and for H1 2026 respectively. Those are different periods and they do not conflict.
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04
The region
The same two makers occupy the first two places in both Europe and Oceania in opposite order, on InfoLink's own regional split. A global claim and a regional claim can both be accurate and still name different companies.
Regionally, both are first somewhere
InfoLink's regional split for the half-year, reported on 1 September 2026, puts Europe at 15.25 GWh with Fox ESS, Sigenergy, Huawei, Deye and BYD Energy Storage as the five largest, and Oceania at 10.03 GWh with Sigenergy, Fox ESS, GoodWe, Sungrow and AlphaESS. The same two makers take the first two places in both regions, in opposite order. Source: InfoLink Consulting regional shipment rankings as reported by PVTIME, 1 September 2026.
That is what a 0.2 percentage point global gap looks like when it is divided by geography. It also means a regional claim and a global claim can both be accurate and still name different companies, which is the same mechanism as the tracker disagreement operating on a different axis.
What this is not
A shipment ranking counts units leaving a factory over a period, as one firm's database counts them. It is not a measurement of how a product performs, how long it lasts, or what happens when a warranty is claimed. No market share enters the scoring rubric on this site, and a supplier's position on any of these trackers moves no score. We report the claims because readers meet them, not because they bear on the benchmark.
The tracker says as much itself. InfoLink's published ranking carries a standing note that its content is provided solely as a reference for market analysis and trend assessment and does not constitute any endorsement, evaluation or investment advice in relation to any company, and a second note that in the event of any discrepancies, figures officially published by manufacturers take precedence. A shipment ranking defers to the manufacturers it ranks on the numbers, and declines to be read as an assessment of them. Source: InfoLink Consulting, 1H26 global ESS shipment rankings, read 20 September 2026.
Our reference page on what BNEF, PVEL and ITP actually measure makes the same point about assessment names that get quoted interchangeably. A shipment tracker belongs in that category: valuable for the question it answers, and quoted for questions it does not.
Three things resolve this
Whether InfoLink's full-year 2026 ranking holds the half-year order. Whether the S&P tracker is reported by any source other than a maker it ranks. And whether either maker restates its claim with the tracker named. We will record all three.
Reported from both makers' own releases, the analyst publications they cite, and the trade press reporting those publications. Fox ESS and Sigenergy are both scored on this site. Neither release misstates its source, and nothing here is a finding of misleading conduct against either company. The 14 per cent figure is as reported by Sigenergy and was not read from S&P Global. A shipment ranking is a measure of volume shipped in a period on one firm's count; it is not a measure of product quality, durability or warranty support, and it forms no part of any score published here.
Sources and method8 references
- Fox ESS, Fox ESS Tops Global Residential ESS Shipments in H1 2026, release via PRNewswire, Wenzhou, 21 August 2026. Primary source for the Fox ESS claim, for its attribution to InfoLink Consulting, for the Frost & Sullivan citation covering 2025 (a 38.1 GWh market with Fox ESS at a 10.5 per cent share), and for the statement that Fox ESS held a 2025 number one ranking from S&P Global Energy. A 3.1 GWh January to July 2026 figure in the same release is not used here: the region it applies to is ambiguous in the surrounding text.
- Sigenergy, Sigenergy Ranks #1 Globally in S&P Global Energy H1 2026 Residential Energy Storage Market Tracker, release via GlobeNewswire, 2 September 2026. Primary source for the Sigenergy claim, the named tracker, the MWh shipments metric and the 14 per cent share. The release does not name a runner-up and does not state who commissioned the tracker.
- Sigenergy, customer newsletter, Sigenergy Day Europe 2026 | Event Highlights Recap, 18 September 2026. Source for the quotation from founder and chief executive Tony Xu and for the absence of any tracker, metric or period in that restatement. This is the item that prompted the piece.
- InfoLink Consulting, 1H26 global ESS shipment rankings, published 14 August 2026, read 20 September 2026. Source for 39.07 GWh of residential shipments in 1H26, the 137.67 per cent year-on-year increase, and the order of the five largest residential suppliers. The page names the order without stating shares.
- InfoLink Consulting, 1Q26 global ESS shipment rankings, published 22 May 2026, read 20 September 2026. Source for 20.67 GWh in 1Q26, the 392.17 per cent year-on-year and 138.42 per cent quarter-on-quarter increases, and the first-quarter order in which Sigenergy is first.
- ESS News, Global residential storage market to hit 46.1 GWh in 2026, says InfoLink, 16 September 2026, and pv magazine, same report, 17 September 2026. Source for the 11.5, 11.3 and 11.0 per cent shares attributed to InfoLink Consulting's global residential energy storage market and shipment database, and for the 46.1 GWh figure, which is a projection of full-year 2026 capacity additions and not a shipment figure.
- PVTIME, Global Residential Storage: H1 2026 Regional Shipment Rankings, reporting InfoLink Consulting, 1 September 2026. Source for the regional totals of 15.25 GWh in Europe and 10.03 GWh in Oceania and for the five largest suppliers in each.
- S&P Global Commodity Insights, Clean Energy Technology Market Insights product page, read 20 September 2026. Read to establish how the firm's clean energy technology research is sold and whether supplier rankings appear publicly on that page. They do not. This establishes nothing about the tracker's contents or method, neither of which was available to read.
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