[RE-wrenches] Kyocera followup

[Allan Sindelar]

Wrenches, A year ago there was a thread here about Kyocera suddenly canceling orders and dropping dealers. We weren't affected, as Kyocera has never been more than a minor supplier since Photocomm/Golden Genesis days. But I was recently cold-contacted by their new sales rep for our region, seeking to drum up possible business. I responded by inquiring about this issue. In my opinion, his response was pretty honest and direct, so when I called yesterday about a few small 12V modules, I asked if I could share it with the list, and he welcomed it. Allan Allan Sindelar al...@positiveenergysolar.com NABCEP Certified Photovoltaic Installer NABCEP Certified Technical Sales Professional New Mexico EE98J Journeyman Electrician Positive Energy, Inc. 3201 Calle Marie Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507 505 424-1112 www.positiveenergysolar.com -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: Kyocera Solar Introduction Date: Mon, 9 May 2011 13:13:21 -0700 From: Robertson, Craig <craig.robert...@kyocera.com> To: <al...@positiveenergysolar.com> Hi Allan,                 Thanks for taking the time to respond to my email. I am hopeful I will be able to give you a reason to try Kyocera’s grid tie modules in the future.                  Regarding the RE-Wrenches post. I wish I could say that this was not a legitimate issue, but unfortunately this was the single most challenging business issue from last year and in my opinion we handled it poorly. We went from a period at the beginning of last year were we had Megawatts in inventory and our pricing was lagging behind most other established module suppliers. These problems caused Kyocera to sign up new accounts and accept every order we could. Then in about a one week period everything changed, we went from having Megawatts in inventory to being sold out for the next 6 months.  Because we had so much demand in such a short period of time, there was no way to support all the projects that we had quoted within a reasonable timeframe. We had to reject and push out many POs from customers. It was not just smaller customers like Don from the post below, who had orders pushed out or rejected, It was large and medium accounts too.  It was a bittersweet time at Kyocera because we were sold out but had damaged relationships with our customer base.                 Now that you have the background, here are the steps that we have taken to insure that this doesn’t happen again. Kyocera hired a full time analyst to track everything related to module supply. We now have a watts tracker that tracks every accepted order and highly confident projects. This insures that we do not accept too many orders. We also have a projects tracker that insures every open quotation is tracked, so that within a certain confidence range, we do not over quote.  With these changes in place, I think we will be in a much better position to handle future spikes in demand.                 If you have any questions regarding these past events please do not hesitate to ask. Going forward, I would like to arrange a call to introduce myself and reintroduce Kyocera. Please let me know when you have 10 minutes available that I can call you to talk. Thanks, Craig Robertson KYOCERA Solar, Inc. 7812 East Acoma Drive Scottsdale, AZ 85260 Office: (480) 948-8003/7818 craig.robert...@kyocera.com www.kyocerasolar.com     From: Allan Sindelar [mailto:al...@positiveenergysolar.com] Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2011 10:30 AM To: Robertson, Craig Cc: ra...@positiveenergysolar.com Subject: Re: Kyocera Solar Introduction   Craig, Thank you for writing. We occasionally buy a few KC/KD135s for existing customers with 12V needs, but haven't found much reason to use Kyocera over other established brands. Before considering the possibility of future partnering, could you review and address the RE-Wrenches posts from about a year ago that I have pasted below? Was this a legitimate issue, and if so, how was it addressed by Kyocera? Thank you, Allan     5/17/2010: Without any word, they have stopped taking orders.! Not only could they not fulfill an immediate need, they refused to even take a pretty nice order for future delivery.???? Who is still getting Kyocera? Whats the deal? Are they dumping the small accounts?? If you are still doing business with Kyocera, what size orders are you placing? Not looking for biz intelligence here, just respond as small, medium or large. Thanks for comments and information. Just trying to figure out where to go from here. Like I'm looking for a supplier who treats smaller shops with some respect. My comments do not reflect on my salesperson at Kyocera who is very upset by being forced to refuse orders. Don Loweburg Offline Solar   5/18/2010: It's the same thing here.  They aren't taking any large orders from us.  Steven Lawrence NABCEP Certified Solar PV Installer(tm)   5/18/2010: If what you say is true, this is not the first time Kyocera has done this. Back in the first quarter of 2006, we were cruising along installing about 15 kW/mo of Kyocera, a mix of 170s and 200s. I had a six month forecast in that vicinity and I would take 10 kW one month and 20 kW the next. Completely out of the blue, without any warning whatsoever, Kyocera stopped shipping to us, not one module, and told us that they had no legal or moral obligation to fulfill the current orders or anything else on our forecast. Furthermore, they could not tell us when they would be able to ship modules to us. They lost their Los Angeles sales person, soon afterwards; hired a replacement and promptly lost the replacement. They then went for many months without a sales person. It looks like déjà vu all over again. - Peter   On 5/6/2011 12:36 PM, Robertson, Craig wrote: Hi Allan and Randy,   My name is Craig Robertson, sales manager of the central region at KYOCERA Solar, Inc. I am based out of Scottsdale AZ. I just moved to the Grid Tie side of Kyocera Solar. I was formerly working in the off-grid and we recently merged the two divisions, so I will be able to share off-grid war stories with Allan.     I know you currently work with Sunpower and Schott. You still have an account at Kyocera, and I would like to explore the possibility of potentially partnering together. A brief update of Kyocera: Our solar panel output range from 20W to 240W, and from Jun/Jul time frame, we will launch 245W. We have two factories in North America, one in San Diego California and one in Tijuana Mexico for a total North American production capacity of 300MW. I would like to talk with both of you in more detail and I am looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks, Craig Robertson KYOCERA Solar, Inc. 7812 East Acoma Drive Scottsdale, AZ 85260  Office: (480) 948-8003/7818  craig.robert...@kyocera.com www.kyocerasolar.com

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