2020-04-01: COVID-19 Sharpens PowerON’s Market Focus

As with almost all companies worldwide, the tragic events around Covid-19 have impacted PowerON’s team and work practices. Dr. Markus Henke, PowerON CEO commented: “With operating divisions in Germany and New Zealand, PowerON lives in the Cloud with videoconferencing anyway, so we’ve been affected a little less than others who had to pick up a completely new way of working”. Dr. Henke noted that PowerON’s team, as with most technology start-ups, had a backlog of tasks and enquiries that were being dealt with. He said: “To be honest, the Covid shutdown has given our team an opportunity to focus on planning, documentation and product configuration details that needed attention as we come up to launch later this year.” Asked about launch plans, he noted that PowerON had been signalling offers of evaluation kits to qualified prospective customers, supported by a specialised High Voltage Signal Generator (HV SG), used for artificial muscle actuators and PowerON’s proprietary elastomer electronics: “Sure, we’ve had some delays. Covid has put back regulatory approval tests for our HV SG – that’s a problem because we have orders outstanding. Covid laboratory shutdowns for around 6 weeks now have also put back availability of our customer-ready elastomer device kits – but we’ll be back on track for later in the year.” Dr. Henke’s final comments were about industry events delayed or cancelled through Covid-19: “Frankly, the largest downside for us, and no doubt others, has been the train wreck Covid has put through the Northern Hemisphere tradeshow and conference season. Hannover Fair was cancelled while other industry events important for PowerON either went on-line or were cancelled, putting a dent in our plans. But it’s given us the opportunity to connect with customers in other ways and get our product offers right.”

For further information contact: sales@poweron.one