Go East, SMA! …or can you „speak“ Cyrillic?

I feel fortunate that I can be a part of a small Czech & Slovak team at the SMA branch, which was founded in 2009 in Prague, pioneering within the Central and Eastern Europe. Thanks to geographical, linguistic and cultural proximity, right from the beginning we were managing not only the Czech Republic, but we have taken neighbouring Slovakia, smaller but promising market, under our patronage as well. And because “the only certainty is a constant change”, not even two years later, even more promising emerging neighbouring markets started to shape up!

Sunny Central 500CP in a 1.15 MWp pv plant in Sbor, Bulgaria

The Sun is rising in the East

The new star on the “Eastern sky” becomes Bulgaria, where the big PV plants grow at the rate of tens or even hundreds of megawatts. Due to the weather conditions – the neighbouring Romania relies more on the wind energy, but even here – PV is becoming an interesting and progressive industry.

The other two markets – Poland and Hungary – are countries that we call the “sleeping beauties” with the total installed capacity of only a couple of Megawatts, but don’t be mistaken: The first Megawatt PV power plant was installed last Autumn in Poland, and you can find several interesting installations – especially on the roofs of shopping centres in Hungary as well.

One team + six countries = big challenge

Of course, taking care of these new markets – it confronts us, the SMA CEE team, with some new challenges. If you only imagine those languages that we are working with now! It is not that easy as before, when we were talking to our customers only in Czech or Slovak.

By the way did you know that the Czechs and the Slovaks can understand each other pretty much the same as for instance Germans and Austrians, or the English and the Scottish? And did you know for example, that Bulgarian language is even not in Latin characters, but in the Cyrillic? For me as a marketer, the management of translations suddenly moves significantly up in my work activities ranking.

All of us, the Czech and Slovak colleagues – team based in Prague, excited about this new challenge, will raise the SMA flag in those four new countries, where there was no local subsidiary until now. Look forward to good news that will be arriving not only from the “Czech-Slovak” SMA, but actually from the “Central & Eastern European” SMA branch!