SMA has announced the company shipped more than 1 gigawatt of solar inverters for large scale PV projects to India last year.
SMA estimates a total market size of 3.9 gigawatts in India in 2016, meaning SMA captured a market share of 26%.
“This is a great success, as the Indian market is of strategic importance for SMA. With a market share of 26% in 2016, we are strongly positioned in this growth market,” said John Susa, SMA Executive Vice President Sales Asia Pacific.
Since 2010, SMA has been present in India with its own sales and service company. In June last year, SMA won India’s 2016 National Excellence Award for Rooftop Solar Power Projects in the category of PV inverters.
In other recent SMA news, late last year the company was voted the most preferred inverter brand in the world (among 52 brands) by all customer groups according to results from IHS Markit’s “PV Inverter Customer Insight Survey 2016”.
SMA received 23% preferred brand status among those surveyed, compared to the second place brand receiving just under 10 percent and third place, roughly 7 percent.
The result is even sweeter for SMA given the increasingly fierce competition in the sector; particularly with the entry of a plethora of lower-priced solar inverters that initially posed a potential threat to the company.
However, not all solar inverters are equal and quality appears to becoming a more crucial issue in brand preference. IHS Market says for the second year in a row, ‘higher PV inverter quality’ was the most selected reason (almost 33%) for a PV inverter supplier to become a customer’s preferred brand.
For the survey, IHS Markit polled wholesalers, installers and EPC (Engineering Procurement Construction) companies in more than 45 countries.
SMA solar inverters are certainly popular in Australia, where they have been commonly used in residential and commercial solar power systems since even before our solar revolution really began.
Germany’s SMA has a history of 35 years+ and more than 50 gigawatts of its solar products were installed globally as of last year.
