Mr. Filippo Carzaniga

Group Executive Chairman

FIMER

What is your role and how would you describe your job? 

I am the Group Executive Chairman of FIMER and despite many managers in my role who has only a representative function, I  am very active into the business. On one side, my first priority is to give the strategic direction to the Company and to the businesses. To give you an example, one of the strategic direction I gave was to invest in the Utility segment in the String Inverter technology and the related digital features. In addition, at the beginning of 2021, we exited the Welding market for our company to focus on investing only in renewable business like solar and emobility.

I am also really active on the business development side supporting the lines of Business and develop more potential business and maintaining direct relationship with our Strategic Partners.

How did you start your journey in the solar industry? 

Our journey into the solar industry started in 2007. We were only involved in Welding and industrial automation so we decided to change direction in diversifying our business.

In this business, there was a slow product and technology evolution, a really high competition and pressure on prices, and finally, we are in a world that paste more and weld less. For these reasons, diversification was a must, it was mandatory to enter in new business with high potential of growth and analyzing the market but especially how to share our experience in Inverter development. We understood the strong potential of the renewable energies and the energy transition.

Today, solar is our primary business. In addition to the charging stations for electric vehicles that today represent the 10% of our business that is growing very fast.

This last business unit was born as a bet 3 years ago when one of our strongest partner was investing in emobility and he needed a partner to develop the infrastructures. We started to analyze this market and thats how it started. Now the Company is focused in Sustainable Businesses only (Solar and emobility) having decided to phase out our historical industrial business at the beginning of 2021.

What is your most memorable moment in Solar? 

In the last 5 years the solar industry changed a lot. The solar technology became really competitive and the market boomed. For this reason, the competition moved from being local to being global and with the technology evolution, the lifetime of an inverter become shorter and shorter. For these reasons it was crucial to have a critical mass big enough to face the global growth so we started to analyze how to grow quickly and especially cover all the market regions in the 5 continents and product segment. We started a discussion with ABB about this ambitious project and after 2 years of negotiations we finally acquired the entire solar business of ABB. This huge step completely change FIMER, not only in dimension but on the strategic point of view. Today we are one of the global Tier 1 player into the inverter industry with a Global presence in 25 Countries with more than 1100 employees