Exclusive Interview With Dalip Sharma – Managing Director, Delta Electronics India Pvt. Ltd
- How much Inverters have you supplied to India till now, what is the target/expectation in 2016-17.
We have a cumulative installation base of more than 300MW across India and we will be shipping more than 600 MW in the year 2016-2017. The major portion of our sales has been in the string inverters segment and our central inverter sales have also been positive.
- Present some noteworthy projects, case studies of solar plants built using your solar Inverters.
As India continues to embrace solar energy and aggressively deploy solar Photovoltaic (PV) plants, our inverters have been part of a majority of installations across various sectors and industries. Among the rooftop string inverter installations we are really proud to have supplied inverters to more than eight major airports in India including Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Lucknow to name a few.Among other key projects, our inverters are operational across many ISRO campuses amounting to a cumulative installation of more than 3.3MW. And the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi KatraRailway Station project is a 1 MW rooftop PV plant which uses twenty numbers of RPI-M50A (50kW) string inverters. We also have our inverters operational at Delhi Metro, Chennai Metro and various railway stations across India.
Also, we recently commissioned 50 MW of utility scale ground mount PV plants across various locations in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
- Please describe in brief about your company, directors, promoters, investors, its vision & mission.
Delta was founded in 1971 and has been the global leader in switching power supply solutions since 2002 and DC brushless fans since 2006.Delta Group is the world’s largest provider of switching power supplies and DC brushless fans, as well as a major source for power management solutions, components, display solutions, industrial automation, networking products, and renewable energy solutions. Delta Group has sales offices worldwide and manufacturing plants in Taiwan, China, Thailand, Mexico, India and Europe. For more than 40 years, Delta Group has pursued the mission:”To provide innovative, clean and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow.” Some of our key customers include Apple, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Dell and Facebook to name a few.
- What is the size of your company in terms of manufacturing capacities, growth chart, future expansion plans, revenues, shipments, ASP’s, financial figures.
Globally Delta has more than 30 manufacturing plants, close to 56 R & D centers and 114 sales offices. Delta continues to deliver strong and stable financial performance, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 31.8% since 1971. Delta’s consolidated worldwide sales revenue in 2015 was US$7.577 billion.
- What are your plans for Manufacturing set up in India, the opportunities and challenges in manufacturing in India.
Delta is part of Government of India’s DigitalIndia initiative and will be investing US$ 500 million to create 20,000 jobs over a period of ten years. Delta has identified around 128 acres of land in South India where we will soon be setting up a state of the art manufacturing facility. We have started manufacturing central inverters at our newly inaugurated manufacturingfacility at Hosur and will soon start manufacturing the popular variants of string inverter models at the same facility by 2017.
- How much is your R&D budget as % of your sales / profits
We commonly invest 6% to 7% of our annual sales revenues in R&D and have worldwide R&D facilities in Taiwan, China, Europe, India, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.S.
- Please share information of some new orders in hand.
The solar industry in India has seen phenomenal growth in the previous year and we are extremely happy to share that we have orders of more than 150 MW in our pipeline from various government and private sector projects.
- What’s your commitment towards the solar sector in India.
Delta was one of the early entrants in the solar inverter segment in India and we have strongly focused on gradually expanding our sales and service teams across the country to enable timely support to our customers. We operate fourteen warehouses and ten service engineer locations across the country, and we are thinking of adding more locations to the list. Delta has played a major role in developing India’s rooftop solar sector with over 30% of the rooftop installations in India operating with Delta solar inverters.
Delta has remained India’s most preferred string inverter make for two consecutive years and has been honored with a National Excellence Awardfrom Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE)for Rooftop Solar Power Projects in the Solar Inverters category recognizing its outstanding contribution towards the development of Indian rooftop solar sector.
