A pioneering Finnish company whose commercial heartbeat combines the manufacture of mechanical power transmission equipment with incomparable after-sales service, Moventas is well-known for its ingenuity and reliability. We put the questions to Simon Schmidt, Senior Vice President of OEM Sales and Business Development.
PES: Welcome back to the magazine. Would you mind explaining a little about the company and how you serve the industry for new readers?
Simon Schmidt: Moventas is a renewable energy technology expert. We lower the cost of energy across the lifecycle of power generation from superior wind gearbox design and manufacture to extensive after sales service for most wind gearbox brands. We have been in the wind gearbox business since the very beginning, i.e. 1980, so our technical knowhow or both gearbox manufacturing and service is hard to beat.
PES: You’re active in both the onshore and offshore arenas. Which is the most active right now?
SS: Providing high torque density and performance for onshore drivetrains is our priority right now in terms of this year and the next, but we are just as active in offshore development (7 & 8 MW), however these projects are longer term. We are also more and more active in the tidal business, as our gearbox knowhow can just as well be utilised in tidal drivetrains.
PES: Moventas is clearly one of the industry’s biggest names. Does this help or hinder you when expanding into new territories?
SS: We are actually not very well known outside of Europe, for example in North America, where we are further expanding our service presence. The message we would like to get across there as well as Europe is that we are in fact one of the most experienced, if not the most experienced, player in the market, yet in the front line of innovations.
On the service side, we would like to emphasise that a majority of the gearboxes we service are other manufacturers’ gearboxes, so despite our 14,000 units’ installed base our after sales service also covers most other brands.
