The solar energy No. Brazil will be more competitive and will grow more than in already developed countriesLike AustraliaIn 2023.
Which is says and bet Alessandra Adam, Latin marketing manager Sofa, a manufacturer of solar photovoltaic and energy storage solutions with a presence in the Brazilian market since 2017.
In all, the company already has more than 200 thousand units sold in the country, reaching 3rd place in Greener's ranking of single-phase photovoltaic inverters in 2021.
to 2023, Sofar's bet protocols for Brazilian market é So great that company will open your first local office in the country, with a team and structure for technical support, sales and marketing services.
Currently, the company has a Portfolio which covers investors from 1 kW to 255 kW, hybrid inverters from 3 kW to 20 kW, storage systems in battery and energy management solutions for residential, commercial and industrial use, as well as large-scale centralized power plants.
In an interview with Canal Solar, Alessandra breaks down these issues and talks about Sofar's prospects for the solar energy sector in 2023. Check out the main excerpts from the interview below:
How does Sofar analyze and project the solar energy market for 2023?
Sofar understands that the Brazilian market still has a very large growth perspective and even greater than compared to other more developed countries, such as Australia, where the current average payback is around eight years.
Even though it is a country closer to China and with income in dollars, the price of equipment sold there is today proportionally more expensive than for us here in Brazil, which until last year had an average payback of four and a half years. .
In other words, even with the changes to Law 14.300, we understand that there is a great interest among the population in making investments in photovoltaic systems and that the Government will provide new types of incentives throughout 2023, especially for less favored classes, such as C and D .
One of them was recently announced, which was the possibility of implementing solar energy systems in the Minha Casa Minha Vida program.
For these and other reasons, we are projecting exponential growth for Sofar in 2023, expanding our operations in the region.
Sofar recently announced that it will create an office in Brazil. Is there any prediction yet on when this will happen?
In April last year, Sofar brought a team and set up an operational office in a coworking space in São Paulo and now we are officially a Brazilian company, with CNPJ and everything else, we are structuring our “Brazil operation”.
We are moving to our own office in the Avenida Paulista region, close to ABSOLAR (Brazilian Association of Photovoltaic Solar Energy). We are just waiting for the samples of the new inverters to arrive so we can set up our showroom and hold the inauguration in March.
And what will be the possible purposes of this space?
We are setting up an office in Brazil to be able to be closer to our distributors and offer more complete assistance, with a sales team for the distributed and centralized generation markets.
This is something new from Sofar for Brazil: services for centralized generation and epecistas. The first order for centralized generation plants with 250kW Sofar inverters arrives in March, and by Intersolar (South America) we will already have the first plant ready to publish the results.
We are also expanding our general portfolio of solutions, doubling the line of 220v three-phase inverters, in addition to already being in the process of certifying and approving hybrid and back-up inverters and batteries, such as PowerAll, which is currently one of the best-selling equipment in Europe, among other news that we will tell you about soon.
Furthermore, we increased our technical team, with a greater focus on product management and technical documentation with Inmetro (National Institute of Metrology, Quality and Technology) to adapt, above all, hybrid equipment for the Brazilian market.
And, we also have a service center team, in Mairinque (SP), for technical support and inverter repair when necessary.
In addition to proximity to customers, did the decision to open a Brazilian Sofar unit also happen for any other reason?
Yes! We understand that every company needs to be in agreement with local habits and the ideal negotiation format for a given region. As the model that Sofar sells its products in Brazil is different from the model that our company trades in China, for example, we understood that it was necessary to create a unit in Brazil to increase our results in a country that currently has one of the greatest potential growth of solar sources in the world.
