SMA POWER ON Event: CEO J. Reinert talks about the PV market, trends for Home and Business Solutions

Welcome to the leading global specialist in photovoltaic system technology. Welcome to a new exciting virtual format. Welcome to Niestetal, Germany, where we create what we call energy that changes. This is SMA Solar Technology AG, introducing our brand new virtual format, Let's Talk Energy: Power On. We thank you for joining us and promised to energize you. And here is your host, Kim Zee.

Hello and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, dear viewers from across and around the globe. Great to have you with us on this very special day. I would like to welcome you all to Let's Talk Energy: Power On, SMA's brand new virtual format, where today we are looking at SMA's highlights for residential and commercial projects. We are coming to you live today from SMA's headquarters in Niestetal, and we are welcoming viewers from all over the globe. In the next four and a half hours, ladies and gentlemen, we have exciting things planned for you. We have a panel discussion, we're going to talk to experts, we have a world premiere, and much, much more, all from the comfort of your own desk. My name is Kim Zee, I'm a freelance moderator, and it is my pleasure to accompany you throughout the day today. I would say to warm ourselves up a little bit and get started, let's see if this interactive tool is ready to go. We're going to start the day with a word cloud. As you know, a word cloud is you enter one word and we're going to see it on the screen, see what word is the word that comes up for a lot of you out there. The question that I'm going to ask you right now is: checking in with you, what do you expect for today? What are your expectations for today? Please type in one word and one word only, and in just a few moments our word cloud will be forming. I personally have to say I'm very excited. 'Excited' would be the word that I type in, or maybe a tiny bit nervous seeing all the things that are happening today. But let's see how you are feeling. The word cloud should be up in just a few moments. Let's see what it is. Here we are. Okay, what do you expect for today? Big information. Well, we're definitely going to have some big information today. Excited, energy for sure. Knowledge, yes, there will be lots of knowledge coming at you today. Learn, also great. There's so much to learn today. We really have fantastic sessions with really, really great presenters lined up for you today. Knowledge, knowledge is very big, and technology of course is also going to play a very, very big part today, and innovation. Yep, innovation and information, so I've got you covered. We are definitely going to have a lot of that. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, dear viewers from across the globe, let's now move on to our Power Talk. And gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to our Power Talk, and I would like to introduce you to our guests at the Power Table. Please welcome the CEO of SMA Solar Technology, Jürgen Reinert. Great to have you here.

Very good, very good. So I'm looking forward to this new event and hope we will cover all the different important aspects. Absolutely. I would also like to introduce you to the Executive Vice President Unit Home and Business Solution, Nick Moba. Welcome.

Good morning, Kimsey. Good morning, everybody.

Good to have you on board. And last but not least, we are very excited to have the Platform Product Manager Home and Business Solutions, Matthias, live with us today. Hey Matthias, are you there?

Hi, good morning, I'm fine. And hello, good morning to everybody around there.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, before we dig a little deeper and go into the matrix of SMA, I would like to let you know that after every segment, after every interview, you have the opportunity to ask questions. So we're going to start with you. If you have any questions for Jürgen, please type them into our interactive area right there, and then we're going to move on down the line. So if there's anything you ever wanted to ask Jürgen, now is your moment. And with that, Jürgen, I will begin with you. If you look back at 2019 and the first half of 2020, what were the highlights for SMA?

Can you tell us what's the market development in the PV segment?

And what about the market trends and drivers?

That leads me up to the next question, which is of course an important topic for SMA, so important that we have a session about it later on today: sustainability. Before we open up the forum to the Q&A, the last question for you, Jürgen, is what does sustainability mean for SMA?

Fantastic. Let's take a look at this point, ladies and gentlemen, at what Q&As we have coming from you. If you have a question you would like to ask the CEO of SMA Solar Technology, Jürgen Reinert, now is your time. I'm just looking at the screen. We have some questions already. If you're ready, here's the first question: I have a question into storage systems. Do you think that this trend will go on further? Will it be a driver only for bigger markets or also smaller ones like Turkey, for example?

The next question is in regards to Corona. You mentioned a little bit earlier. How does Corona affect your delivery times and what actions are you taking to overcome the impact of COVID-19?

Happy to take your order. Any order. Let's move on to energy management. Jürgen, what are the next steps in energy management? Is your IoT platform 'ennexOS' for energy management being further developed?

We got one more question here in our screen, but you only have one minute to answer it. This is going to be the added difficulty here. What is SMA doing to work with the EV industry? What is going to be the key aspects to be a leader in this venture?

Fantastic, still had four seconds. Just a little bit short, but we are in a tight schedule here. But the good news is later on today we have a whole session about e-mobility where we're going to talk about exactly that, the holistic approach. Thank you very much, Jürgen. With that, I'll move on to you, Nick. Now we heard about this situation in general being very complex. For example, the digitalization of energy. Can you tell us how is SMA positioned here?

So if you accept, I can say the three Ds are extremely relevant within our industry. You know, we're coming from today, which is even in the transition phase, severely from a central power generation with big plants, gas, coal, nuclear powered, into a world which is highly decentralized and a massive usage of renewables. And doing and getting the decarbonization done, so renewables and solar are key. And in that part of decarbonization, also the use of electrical vehicles, storage as you've mentioned, comes into play very heavily because you need to store your excess energy, you need to manage your grid. So storage and integration of storage is a very key point, and also integration of electrical vehicles. And coming to the lastly, the digitalization, this is the key element in order to get all that complex world managed. And here SMA is coming into play because we are offering the entire system solution to manage that complex world for all customers, for our installers, for the end user.

Now to be able to offer seamlessly integrated solutions, I can imagine that a huge portfolio is necessary. So at least it is large. Are there further solutions that SMA offers in addition to these components that you just mentioned?

You know, we are in a constant development of the entire portfolio to make it better, to make it a better fit to what the new energy world is. So I said the base is always our components, everything around in terms of integrated features. The second layer is the service we are offering for our customers, for installer, for end customer. And the top of the pyramid is the software. This is the part where everything gets managed. And also we are offering, for example, our daughter company in Munich with Matrix, we are offering also managed service, for example for electrical vehicle fleets, to manage the charging of entire fleets, manage the billing for home, for work. This is one of the latest things, and also we will hear something about that later.

Now one last question for you quickly. What are the solutions that you offer? You mentioned installers. Are there solutions that you have for installers especially to really keep it simple for them?

We have the installer most clearly. It is for us the most important part in the entire value chain because the installer, he is the one who managed the complexity at the end. He's the one getting the components, need to put the components and get them running. And here we are supporting the installer with our approach which is called Sunny 360 professional support. We are supporting you as an installer from the acquisition phase to the installation phase towards the phase of operation and maintenance in a 360 manner, with all the tools. The latest entries in our tool chain we have developed, for example, Smart Connected with Sunny Design Pro, the new commissioning support, etc., to make the business of the installer more efficient and better and get them the ability to have that complex world also into an installation. And the access point of that is the new 360 app. We will hear later in the session today about that.

So we've got a couple minutes left, Nick. If you're ready, let's go to the Q&A and let's see what questions our viewers from across the globe have lined up for you. Questions for Nick in our Q&A coming up on the screen in just a second. So they're not on our screen yet, but now you're there now. Nick, why is SMA now branding a Chinese inverter to launch the Core 2?

That's a good question, and it's important to ask this question and to transpire answer that one. You know, we're in a world under extremely high cost pressure, and on a parallel path we need to develop new things like software, like the management platform, etc., in order to support the new world of energy. In that world, the leaders need to raise economies of scale within the industry to finally have a better and most cost-efficient solution for our customers. When we are branding an inverter, that does not mean that the heart of the inverter is not an SMA; it means we are getting it produced from a second source. But everything which is software, everything which is integration within our system environment, everything which is quality, reliability, testing, is SMA. And SMA is the one bringing it into the market and SMA is the one being reliable for the product, taking the warranty and taking the service of the product. So it is an SMA product produced by another vendor which has a very good fit within our industry and to leverage economies of scale. This is the key element here. It's got the heart and soul of SMA.

Okay, we have one minute left. Let's see if we have another question from our Q&A board. Let's see if there's a question coming in. Viewers with us from around the world, typing into our interactive area now. This is your moment to ask Nick Moba a question. And those questions are making their way to us. Know, sometimes we saw three questions but they went for a little walk. What's your next breakthrough in the world of inverters?

I would say, beside the one introduction we are seeing today, the next great breakthrough will be our new home solution inverter. But it's not just an inverter, it's an entire fleet of inverters for the global application, and it's also a completely new home solution. So we are renewing over the next years and we will start at the end of next year with the renewing of the entire home portfolio. So not just the inverter, the energy management platform, storage, charging, and everything which comes in the SMA system solution.

Fantastic. Now if there's any more questions you have for Nick, Nick will be answering them later on throughout the day. So if you had a question and we didn't get to it now, it surely will be answered a little bit later. Thank you very much, Nick. With that, thank you. Let us now have a closer look at some new products. It was kind of the perfect segue from Nick. Now, Matthias, which highlights would you like to present to us today?

Yes, thank you, Kim Zee. Yeah, you touched products, and I would say product is really the key word. And as we have seen from the previous speakers, Jürgen and Nick, that we are not talking about only single products. So this is more that we are talking about the systems, the system offerings SMA is doing. And this is now, and also in the course of the sessions we have later today, always the key element: the single product, how it is placed and how it is deployed in our total system. And the first product here which then fits also to the system is, yeah, we have heard about that, the brand new Sunny Tripower Core 2, our brand new flagship. And yeah, we have already had a first question before we really talked about that, so that makes me really happy because we see that the market is there, the interest is there, and the people are talking already about the product. And yeah, we want to clear up all the rumors that are going around there because the rumors don't help us. So we will give the clear messages and answers about that brand new product. And that product's features and benefits are really based on three main pillars: more options, more integration, and more performance. And you may ask, hey, what does it mean? Where are the benefits in there? And I would say we have prepared something for our customers, a short video clip, and I would like to say let's get it started and let's see what's behind those three pillars.

The new Sunny Tripower Core 2 brings greater flexibility to system design. System planners benefit from maximum flexibility in string design, which allows them to implement different commercial systems up to the megawatt range very easily and conveniently. As a key component of the energy system business, the SMA inverter enables modular expansion according to specified requirements, all coordinated from a single source. Systems with the new Sunny Tripower Core 2 manage without DC combiners. This means that installation and commissioning are completed very quickly. The smart integrated SMA features optimize energy yield right from the start and throughout the entire life of the system.

Wow, that was a fantastic video. Thank you so much, Matthias. We're going to find out a lot more about the Sunny Tripower Core 2 just a little bit later.

Yeah, for sure. Now, coming to the EV charging solutions for home and business and companies. We touched that also in the previous talks with Nick and Jürgen about the importance, and everybody is talking about electrical vehicles. So it's getting more and more popular. Everybody would like to have a car, and yeah, having a car is good, but you always need to have the charging solutions for that one. And starting here right now on the left side here, we can see our offerings, our solutions for the charging for the homes, homeowners, for the residential. And here again, the system is key. A wallbox, how that unit is mostly called, simple wallbox you can buy everywhere. So this isn't a no-brainer, but the key message is here you have to have an integration into the home and in the home system. We have the Home Manager here, and to get more out of the system, the intelligence is behind the system we have in there. For example, fast charging solutions or also weather forecast based, prognosis based charging of your cars. And this is yeah, we definitely differentiate from our competitors. We get more about that in the sessions with my colleagues later on too. And definitely, looking out in the middle here, we can see, and this is a brand new information today as well. So not only for the homeowners and the home charging solutions we have here, we also have now a charging solution for commercial applications, for companies where you have a bunch of cars, a fleet of cars which need to be charged. And this is really getting complicated because you have to manage everything. And managing is again the key factor here, not only the pure hardware but the whole system again. And yeah, we have now here the new charging solution with up to 22 kilowatts, two times on a charging station, which definitely fits all the requirements we see around in the circle of the commercial applications of charging fleets. And then we can see here on the right side that not only the charging of electrical vehicles is important, but also the storage, the stationary storage we have. And therefore SMA also has an offering which we definitely introduced last year during Intersolar and we develop that more and more over the last months, which is our Sunny Tripower Storage solution with the SMA storage in the back. And with the stationary storage solution, we will open the range of getting more applications and more business cases for our customers. For example, we are talking about a self-consumption increase for sure, so shifting the consumption or shifting the energy which we produce by day from PV into the night so that we can also power our consumers with PV energy in the night times. But also very attractive applications like peak load shaving. And this is also an application where a lot of our customers can make business in the future. So this is again the trend. So with our systems and our components which you can add every time or also at the latest stage, we are future-proof for future business. And yeah, this is again the differentiator with SMA in our whole system approach.

We are touching now one important topic today will be the 360 app. Can you briefly talk about that before we get to the Q&A with you?

Yeah, for sure. And the 360 app was also mentioned by Nick in his session. So the 360, what is behind that? Why 360? 360 is really about having the customer and the focus and going around the whole customer journey we have. So the digitalization, the three Ds was one of it, and here now finally we have it. So what is in there? So we have the new app which is still available now since the beginning of May, and a lot of installers have already downloaded it. So we are on the whole customer chain: starting with the planning of the PV plant at the customer on site, then going to the operation of the inverters or of the whole system, making the commissioning of it, and also doing the services. This is now all included in just one app, and all that is connected to our Sunny Design from the beginning from the planning and also to the Sunny Portal for the operation of the system and making the operational and also the servicing of that one. So the whole approach, the whole value chain of our customers is now integrated in that professional app.

Now I do still have a bunch of questions and you also brought a short clip, yes, for this app, but time is actually running out. So I would say we skip the clip of 36 seconds and just one last question for me before we get to the Q&A. That was the professional app 360. Now what about the end customers?

Yeah, also the end customers. Yeah, and an app is what everybody is using and they are asking, 'Hey, is there an app coming?' And definitely you are asking, also we can say yes. So we will really launch a new app for the end customers, and you get more insights about that from our product managers later in the sessions today. We have here, for an instance, other people who will talk you more about that one.

Now we've got a minute and a half for you to answer five questions. Wow, I think that's going to be a little bit tough. So let's see which one of those five can you answer in this short time. We can start up. So are there plans to increase MPPT input of the inverter?

So with the new Core 2, we have now 12 MPP trackers, and that is on an inverter with 110 kilowatts. I would say this is really, really huge, this is really flexible, and you can face all the issues you would like to have with shading, etc. So at the moment, no. 12 is at the moment the maximum we are providing, and this is really the maximum.

That's the questions that we received from Matthias. Matthias will be answering them a little bit later on in your own time via email, not rushed, so you can really get to all the different points right. Do you agree? Yes, sure, I will answer everything. Take one more breath, and with that, ladies and gentlemen, question? I'm going to maybe in 20 seconds. You would read it? Okay. Its shade optimizing inbuilt inside the Core 2 inverter? What is Core 2 AC voltage? Is the system design for Europe or for the international market? And make it really, really fast, and then hopefully everybody joins at 9 o'clock.

So the AC voltage is 400 volts. It is also for the international markets, not only for Europe. And key element: there are no optimizers in the system. At SMA, we have no optimizer, so everything is integrated into our inverters.

Now you can take one more breath, and I have a final lightning round for all three gentlemen. Do you have the opportunity in this final lightning round to express one core statement? And if you want, you can express it straight to the camera. Start with you.

Sustainability is a key element and part of the DNA of SMA. SMA is here to stay. You can rely on us.

Yeah, so I would say to our customers, you have seen the system offerings we have, and I'm really convinced that the offerings we are having are really facing the demand and the requirements you are having in the markets. So SMA is the right partner for you.

Gentlemen, thank you very much not only for your statements but also for your keen insights. So thank you so much for attending. See you very soon right here on Let's Talk Energy: Power On.