Despite showing up at All Energy conference with a perfectly swank and expensive trade stand, it appears SMA Australia has quietly withdrawn from the Australian market.
Surely SMA haven’t gone broke? No, they’ll maintain a presence in the large scale commercial sector for solar farms.
Why Is SMA Leaving Australia?
It’s been a couple weeks since I saw a grainy photo of a PC screen which put a ripple of disbelief through solar circles, however the PDF copy obtained since is clear enough. What was once the undisputed Australian market leader in solar inverters, SMA have packed up their sales operation completely.
This is all the confirmation we have at the moment.
Stood The Test Of Time
A foundational part of mass market solar and ongoing part of the industry furniture, SMA will be missed by the kind of people who prioritised quality and longevity.
Probably the oldest SMA I encountered – a BP Solar branded GCI200 coupled to Australian made, 75 watt frameless BP Solar panels.
Thankfully SMA are honourable enough to honour their warranties – they’re apparently maintaining a local office so everyone with a SunnyBoy/Sunny Island/Sunny Storage can still enjoy a bright outlook. Although I don’t know how “smart connected” services will work going forward.
It’s a stark contrast to Hanwha effectively abandoning Australia when they pulled the pin on Qcells. Not to throw any shade at Zeco, but leaving national obligations to a company operating in two states is a bit cheap on Hanwha’s part.
I Loved SMA
As a sole trader I never advertised. Either I got to yarning with people or my phone simply rang because someone had recommended me. For years I simply installed SMA Sunny Boy TL5000 inverters with 20 plus panels on the roof, and they were rock solid.
Reliability personified.
The only time I weakened, a customer talked me into a cheap piece of junk, which taught me a great lesson. You should never compromise your standards because replacing a Growatt 5 times over doesn’t pay.
However none of my customers have ever rang back to complain about the stout red box on the wall, but sadly the sands of time have caught up with some of the Simax panels I’d installed with SMA inverters. The guys at Suntrix said Simax were excellent quality, but in retrospect I should have been selling REC panels.
When your panels turn out to be rubbish and the water leaks into the edges, you end up with earth faults which knobble output until they possibly dry out. The problem will only get worse and your SMA inverter will protest with a red light and an isolation error on the screen.
“Insulation resist” and the dreaded red light have brough production to a stop after 91.926MWh and 11yrs 4 days – roughly 22.85kWh/day. About the only flaw to report was an occasional screen failure simply due to age.
There’s Only One Way When You’re #1
As SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock commented to me about SMA recently: “they did it to themselves”. It’s a shame really, but when you’re leading the market there’s always a possibility of falling off the wheel.
As I recall, there were a few factors which may have brought SMA undone. A 2008 world economic crisis was dodged by Australia, but the German company didn’t maintain production enough to satisfy the burgeoning market here. My own house ended up with an Australian made Latronics PVE2500 because we couldn’t buy anything else.
The incredibly heavy and robust SunnyBoy 1100, 1700 & 2500, or SMC series were the industry standard for many years, but when SMA moved to transformerless topology the TL 3000, 4000 & 5000 took over everywhere. Then came the HF units for a short while.
The SMA HF3000 solar inverter.
However the real defining moment was when the German-manufactured Sunny Boy TL was superseded around 2016 by the AV 40. All of a sudden we had “premium” products that were dead on arrival. Installers were already upset that the screen had gone missing, but a ludicrous quality control failure that delivered brand new but broken inverters just torched SMA’s reputation.
I’ve never seen an AV40 catch fire but they certainly incinerated SMA’s reputation.
Everyone said screw you and your move to Chinese manufacture. Especially when there was a separate cheap brand brought out with SMA support. ZeverSolar had a short life and I’m thankful I only ever dirtied my hands on one of them.
SMA Sunny Island 48V battery inverters turned up everywhere, including this Redfow off grid system with a tonne of lead batteries in the back end.
The Nice Germans Were Waiting
When Fronius came out with the snapinverter range, the rest was history. While SMA had replaced the trusty and infomative LCD screen with 3 LEDs and a newfangled monitoring app, they found people just don’t like change.
Fronius had an equally good Austrian reputation and they had a better screen. With the right code installers had probably a hundred menus accessible via 4 buttons. Solarweb online monitoring available via WiFi and no pesky bluetooth interface, it was a real winner.
More Recently
It seems SMA have just lost interest in Australia. Even with the release of the new hybrid battery systems in October 2023, the EV charger wasn’t part of the Australian lineup, Though we have at least one 5 star review of it being installed.
As recently as March 2025 they were talking up a recovery after some pretty ordinary results, but it seems Australia just isn’t part of the plan.
Please leave us some comments, or better still, write a review if you have a good yarn to tell about SMA. You never know, they might come back one day.
About Anthony Bennett
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