Pierre-Pascal Urbon, CEO of solar inverter manufacturer SMA, has said that the company is anticipating medium-term “exponential growth” in the energy storage market, reporting a “positive performance” in storage-related sales.
SMA, which in around 2014 and 2015 could comfortably have been said to have supplied around one third of all central inverters deployed worldwide, this morning released its financial results for the first half of this year.
In short, the company reported 3.8GW of inverter sales in the six month period, similar to 2016’s first six months, when 3.9GW of devices were sold. This equated to €381.1 million and EBITDA of €29.0 million. SMA also said it has an order backlog of €673 million. However, due to price pressures in the PV market overall, sales figures were considerably lower than in H1 2016, when almost the same number of inverters sold meant €482.3 million in sales.
“After a moderate start to the year, SMA increased its sales by 20% in the second quarter of 2017 as against the first three months of the year,” Urbon said.
“We saw a favourable increase in all key segments, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC). For the second half of the year, we expect the business to significantly pick up again based on strong incoming orders in all markets”.
The company is forecasting sales across all segments of between €900 million and €950 million for the 2017 financial year and net cash to rise to over EUR450 million.
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