Heraeus Photovoltaics Releases New Family of Metallization Pastes with New Silver Powders

Heraeus Photovoltaics, the worldwide leading supplier of metallization solutions to the PV industry, recently announced a new and comprehensive supply chain strategy to ensure of AG silver powders for its product line. As part of this comprehensive plan, Heraeus has implemented a multi-supplier sourcing strategy, an expanded safety stock policy as well as redundant paste options for customers.

These changes were made in order to quickly respond to recent events that affected the operations of a major supplier of silver powder. The incident revealed that the global PV industry could be vulnerable to an even short-term interruption of the supply of key raw materials. Heraeus, while experiencing a very partial impact, used the event to strengthen its supply chain and manufacturing strategies. As a result, Heraeus has expanded its trading partner network to include additional silver powder suppliers as well as a careful safety stock policy. Heraeus now releases its newest family of pastes based on different silver powders than before. The purpose of this family-release is the round-up completion of Heraeus’ set of redundant pastes which backup each other.

This redundant product offering by Heraeus helps to further decrease key material dependency. Samples of the new paste family are already available and shipped to customers. This approach enables Heraeus customers to be assured their current and future PV needs will not be vulnerable to events or interruptions that could have potentially negative impact on their business interests.

For many years, Heraeus has successfully implemented a multiple sourcing strategy for key raw materials such as silver powder. By this strategic supply chain approach Heraeus’ customers benefit from continuous product quality and supply security. Additionally, safety stock inventories of silver powder are maintained to minimize short-term effects of potential interruptions in raw material supplies to the greatest possible extent. Presently Heraeus is working very closely with its customers to implement solutions, which fulfill both their short-term demands as well as their long-term delivery requirements.