Area of action: Product stewardship

Sustainable product life cycle

It is important to us to know what effects our products have on the environment so that we can derive measures on this basis and improve product sustainability. Life cycle assessments for representative product categories help us identify the factors that influence the sustainable product life cycle.

High quality and long lifetime

Continuous reduction of wearing parts and efficient maintenance routines make a positive contribution to SMA inverters’ lifetime. We qualify components that are critical to the product’s lifetime separately before their use.

In addition, we conduct extensive functional and endurance tests during the development phase. Before series production, SMA devices undergo field tests in our own and in selected customer installations. One important key figure for the quality of our products is their field failure rate. This key quality figure refers to the number of failures in the field after the products are approved. For each SMA product, ambitious and specific product lifetime and field failure rate targets are defined and assessed each year. In 2023, we achieved our 2025 goal of reducing the field failure rate of our products to 1.0% (monthly rolling key figure; ratio of field failures over the past two years to the number of units shipped over the past two years).