Increase in brand value. Brands are not just intangible ideas in consumers’ minds. Brands also have a financial value. According to a determination of the brand value by Semion Brand Broker, SOLARWORLD achieved a brand value of € 24 million in 2008. The SOLARWORLD brand thus ranked 48th among the most valuable German brands.
In December 2008, the German Sustainability Award jury presented the award as “Germany’s most sustainable brand” to SOLARWORLD, together with Volkswagen and Henkel. 350 companies had applied for that award, including many DAX groups. The companies had to fill in an online questionnaire describing the ecological, economic, and social factors implemented in the individual stages of their value chain. Further aspects of the questionnaire included the impact of sustainable processes and communication about sustainability issues on brand strategy. The assessment was carried out by A.T. Kearney und BBDO Consulting. Also involved were organizations such as the German Council for Sustainable Development, the Brand Association, the Federal Ministry for the Environment, the Potsdam Research Institute for Climate Effects and the Wuppertal Institute. However, SOLARWORLD not only received an award for its brand; the SOLARWORLD Group was also given an award as “Germany’s most sustainable production”. Strategic raw material activities
Solar2World – social commitment under the SOLARWORLD brand. Awareness of the SOLARWORLD brand was reinforced by further activities in fiscal year 2008. Under the cover of Solar2World www.solar2world.de we are pooling not-for-profit projects with which our employees support regional development by means of development aid projects for rural electrification based on solar power solutions. Our decentralized offgrid solutions offer people in off-grid regions not only access to power but, at the same time, access to one of the key fundamentals for further economic and social development. In 2008, these projects focused on Africa. www.solarworld.de/sustainability
Commitment to “clean” motor sport and young engineers. Supporting the ‘SOLARWORLD no.1’ project, we wish to demonstrate the efficiency of modern solar power technology in the field of mobility. Following a successful race in Australia in 2007, we again demonstrated the enormous potential of photovoltaic power through our participation in the ‘North American Solar Challenge’ from Dallas, USA, to Calgary, Canada. The solar racer jointly developed with students covered a distance of 2,400 miles in ten days – powered exclusively by the sun and sophisticated engineering. Human resources www.solarworldno1.de
For the fourth year in succession we presented the SOLARWORLD Einstein Award for trail-blazing developments in solar power technology. The award was presented to Professor Antonio Luque López of the Institute for Solar Energy at the University of Madrid, and to Dutch junior physicist Bram Hoex. While López is one of the leading international pioneers in photovoltaic technology, Hoex presented his first contribution to this research area with his doctoral thesis. This deals with alternative coating technologies for the production of silicon-based solar cells and shows how he succeeded in improving the overall efficiency of solar cells.
