30 March 2009
Andy Gales, vice president, international sales, Vicor
Andy Gales, vice president, international sales, Vicor, talks with Chris Shaw
CS: At the end of 2008, Vicor announced that it was investing heavily in its European sales organisation. Given recent events, has this focus changed and if so, in what way?
AG: Vicor has not been immune from the global slow down and we have indeed needed to take some difficult decisions in Q1 2009. Vicor Europe has reduced staffing in line with a 6% reduction of staff Worldwide. Given the unpredictability of the market we felt it was prudent to take early action. We remain confident about our business in 2009 as our business model of providing 'mass customisation' - providing standard solutions to solve customers' custom power supply requirements - means that our business is spread over a very broad customer base and growth is not heavily dependant on any one market sector.
CS: What can Vicor provide design engineers?
AG: Vicor has always been a technology driven company. Vicor's strength is in providing engineers with small, efficient, easy to use power components. Vicor manufactures a broad range of over 10,000 standard power modules so the chances are high that we will have a suitable solution for a specific application. Vicor realises that many engineers now required to design power systems may have no previous experience in power and we have a team of applications engineers based at each of our four European technical support centres able to help with advising and solving power issues.
CS: Are you encouraged by the progress of the VIChip business unit?
AG: VIChip business has grown steadily and now represents over 10% of Vicor Corporation total sales. What is even more encouraging is the number and breadth of the project design wins which have broadened out from our initial success in high end servers to include significant wins in automatic test equipment, led lighting and in the industrial and defense markets. We are still at an early stage of the roll out of the VIChip platform and expect significant long term growth from the VIChip business.
CS: What trends have you observed in high performance conversion components?
AG: Advances in device technology and packaging together with improvements in switching topologies have allowed Vicor to improve power density in their converters by a factor of over 20 during the last 25 years. We see this trend continuing for the foreseeable future. Developments in switching topologies and improvements in semiconductor devices continue to allow increases in converter efficiency. Digital power, the replacement of analogue components by digital circuitry, is adding increase functionality to power components.
CS: Which sectors do you see as the strongest in the current economic downturn?
AG: Government funded projects are likely to fair the best as the various stimulus packages are rolled out into industry. The defence sector has traditionally had long time planning horizons and is unlikely to down turn significantly in the short term. Other sectors like telecom / datacom should fair well as broadband infrastructure continues to roll out and provide improved bandwidth. Transportation and the trend to alternative energy sources are other areas of growth in the economy.
Author
Chris Shaw
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.vicr.com/
Companies
Vicor UK Ltd
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