Bosch moves quietly into solar

Bosch moves quietly into solar: "Very quietly, with hardly a press release, the huge German automotive parts maker Robert Bosch is setting up to be a major player in both PV and EV.

Bosch is at least a $50 billion company. It's been selling solar water-heating equipment for several years. Last year Bosch bought controlling interest in Ersol, a leading German maker of solar cells and modules, in silicon and thin-film formats. A couple of days ago the company bought a controlling share of Aleo, a leading German thin-film module manufacturer. This latest announcement suggests that Bosch will make controllers and other circuitry for EVs and possibly make inverters for its own PV modules.

Bosch is a unique company and does things in ways that would be considered odd in any other corporation. It's the world's largest maker of electrical parts for cars and trucks, and so it's been hurt badly by the downturn in the automotive business. Setting up for EVs would be a normal reaction to this situation - the company will naturally be the major supplier of components for European-built EVs, including products from VW, Mercedes, BMW and Fiat.

Bosch is 92% owned by a charitable foundation -- it's as if the Ford Foundation got 92% of the profits from Ford Motor Co. The company is run by a board of trustees who themselves hold less than 1% of the stock but vote the 92% of shares owned by the foundation - and the Bosch family owns the remaining 7%. So the company makes decisions quickly and based on long-term planning, not on short-term stock price considerations. One result is they spend twice as much on R&D, as a percent of their budget, as anyone else in the automotive business.

A little historical background: Founder Robert Bosch was a farmer's son who trained as a technician and then went to America, where he worked for Thomas Edison for a few years (he also helped found a Siemens division in the UK). Back home in Germany, in 1897 he invented the first commercially successful magneto for motor vehicles; five years later his firm marketed the first reliable spark plug. He set up factories around the world, including in the United States. During the Depression, instead of pulling in his horns, Bosch expanded and diversified; he had a reputation for very progressive labor and social policies, which didn't do him much good after the Nazis came to power. Bosch died in 1942, and after the war the family restructured the company's finances to support charities worldwide.

I think Bosch is going to be huge in solar and electric transport, and very quickly. Those of us who grew up tinkering with old cars and motorcycles have deep respect, if not warm fuzzies, for Bosch. When the Triumph or Fiat wouldn't start, you could blame Joseph Lucas or Magneti Marelli. But no one ever cursed the name of Robert Bosch."