Sustainability Context

My understanding from the people I talked to is that Applied Materials, one of world's largest semiconductor manufacturing equipment providers, pressured the organizers of SEMICON to jointly hold the InterSolar event otherwise they would pull out. It turns out that InterSolar was very well attended with a very large contingent of Germans. In fact, most firms had at least one representative from Germany.

Nathan Polland, an intern, who works with us at the CleantechBlog visited about 75 companies at InterSolar 2008 and found that among the newer entrants into the market (and there are many), they are growing at 50+% a year!






The older, more established firms did not experience as fast growth as the entrants but are still gaining significantly from the market momentum. For more interesting statistics about the solar market, please check out Mr. Polland's full report.

I asked a German-American businessman who facilitates trade deals between the two countries on his views of Japanese companies in the US market. He noted that Sharp, which is one of the leading providers in Japan, has not done well in the US. He believes the problem lies in the fact that upper management in Japan does not have a good grasp of the US market. This is partly because the company does not let the US subsidiary take their own charge and develop a strategy that is appropriate here.