As President of SOLARUNITED, Eric Ast is a busy man. And also being Global Business Development Manager Photovoltaics at Multi-Contact, makes him an even busier man. We managed to grab five minutes with the respected industry pioneer to ask him about the company and its current aspirations.
PES: Welcome back to PES. How has business been since we last spoke?
Eric Ast: The PV landscape has changed irrevocably these last years. We have seen expansion in three directions, vertically (within value chain), horizontally (the industry is getting more and more segmented by application) as well as geographically seeing a shift of demand from Europe to APAC (mainly China and Japan); the U.S., as well as a growing number of emerging countries.
Being a part of the Stäubli Group brings Multi-Contact the ideal set-up to address these challenges with three production sites globally (Germany, U.S. and China), as well as more than 20 business units and a large number of distributors around the world. Wherever a PV system is installed, you’ll find local support and training for the MC range of products.
Beside this, Multi-Contact is proud to announce that by mid-2015 we reach the tremendous number of 100GW of PV system successfully connected with our famous PV connectors, means that we have 1 Billion connectors already installed in the field.
PES: We note that you’ve launched the MC4 EVO – how will this benefit the PV industry?
EA: The MC4 Evo series (MC4-Evo2 and MC4-Evo3) delivers these days the highest possible certification level, compliant with TüV 1500V, UL 1000V, as well as JET for the Japanese market. We strongly believe that this is the connector of the future.
