TMEIC Customer Case Story: Powering Business Development with Market Intelligence

"I learned more about microgrids in the last two weeks from data I pulled off of your website than I have in my entire lifetime." — Stephan Bondy, Business Development Manager, TMEIC.

TMEIC designs, develops, and engineers advanced automation systems, large AC and DC motors, photovoltaic (PV) inverters, and variable frequency drive (VFD) systems. As a global leader in photovoltaic inverter manufacturing, TMEIC supports a wide range of industries with high-capacity solutions. These industries include Renewable Energy, Metals, Material Handling, Oil & Gas, Mining, Paper, Testing, and other industrial sectors around the world.

Stephan Bondy, Business Development Manager

Stephan Bondy, Business Development Manager at TMEIC, focuses on clean energy solutions, particularly on the hydrogen market value chain, electric vehicle charging infrastructure for distribution centers and transport hubs, and microgrid solutions. His role requires comprehensive market intelligence to identify opportunities for TMEIC's existing products to be deployed or adapted to serve emerging markets.  In addition to repurposing existing products, he also uses market intelligence to create business cases for new product development.

Previously, Bondy relied on a few subscriptions with specific focus areas for market data. While these sources provided project-based information for particular sectors, they had significant gaps in emerging areas like EV charging infrastructure and microgrids. Bondy would conduct extensive Google searches to fill these gaps, which, while sometimes enjoyable as "sleuthing," consumed substantial time and often led to unproductive diversions into interesting but irrelevant topics.

Challenges

Stephan faced several critical challenges:

1. Incomplete Market Data: Existing subscriptions lacked comprehensive information on emerging sectors critical to TMEIC's growth strategy. "There's always gaps. Everybody has gaps," Bondy notes about traditional research sources.
2. Time-Consuming Research: Manual Google searches require extensive time and often lead to distractions.
3. Data Reliability Concerns: Bondy places high value on source quality. "I'm shy about pulling data from unknown sources. I used to work at a museum and a library, and I learned in both jobs the importance of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. If you just pull data off the web without knowing the source, it's garbage to me."
4. Monetization Requirements: The business development department needed to demonstrate clear pathways to revenue generation (in the millions of dollars) to justify investments in product development.
5. Building Internal Cases: TMEIC's corporate culture requires robust data to support product development decisions, which can be significant investments in time and resources.

Solution

After a colleague's recommendation, Bondy discovered Statzon's market intelligence platform. Impressed by the quality of the research methodology, particularly the focus on primary sources and interviews with industry stakeholders, Bondy decided to subscribe to the service.

Statzon provided TMEIC with:

• Comprehensive market studies with monetized market data — "The single best thing is the market research that's being made available to me because I need to dollarize everything," says Bondy
• Unit counts for various market segments
• White papers offering in-depth analysis of industry ecosystems
• Insights into market structures, including key stakeholder groups and their interrelationships
• Data on specific components like DC-to-DC converters relevant to TMEIC's product portfolio

Results

Within just a few weeks of using Statzon, TMEIC began seeing significant benefits:

1. Accelerated Knowledge Acquisition: Bondy learned more about microgrids in two weeks using Statzon than in his "entire lifetime" of previous research.
2. More Focused Research: Unlike open-ended Google searches, Statzon allowed Bondy to focus on relevant market data without diverting into tangential topics.
3. Strategic Planning Support: The data acquired directly supports the development of compelling business cases for two strategic initiatives: one in the hydrogen market and another in EV charging.
4. Product Opportunity Identification: Detailed market data is helping identify new applications for existing products, such as DC-to-DC converters originally developed for port applications.
5. Enhanced Decision-Making: Comprehensive market data provides the foundation for informed product development decisions, helping determine necessary modifications for different environments, voltages, or currents.

While still in the early stages of implementation, Statzon has already demonstrated enough value that Bondy has recommended it to colleagues in similar roles. He appreciates how the platform helps identify new applications for existing products: "We invent hammers, and then we start looking for nails... we invent a product. Oh, this is so cool. Where else can we use it? And that's me."

As TMEIC's typical evaluation cycle for new tools spans 1-2 years, the full impact on revenue generation will be assessed over time, with success measured by the achievement of what Bondy calls "new industries orders goals" attributable to insights gained through Statzon's market intelligence.