What’s new in UPS, you ask? OK, you didn't ask because you don’t think anything really new is going on. Isn’t it a mature market with a few behemoths locking up the business?
Yes... and no. It is a mature market but Geneva-based AST Power Quality Solutions believes it can target the exposed underbelly of the old UPS beasts. The very fact that UPS is mature means the market leaders have over-extended their product lines, added more complicated features to units to justify their price points, and evolved clunky ordering and logistics structures. All for single digit profit margins. It’s the maturity that has created their vulnerabilities, argues AST-PQS.
Founded in 2009 and out with their A Series UPS line in Europe in September 2010, AST Power Quality Solutions is an independent joint-venture business extension to ASTModular SA, a provider of modular data centres and headquartered in Barcelona.
AST-PQS goal is to build a complete set of all-inclusive power quality solutions (aka UPS) for the professional (B2B) 1-phase markets. The USP of their UPS (OK, I’ve been waiting years to work in that clever phraseology of acronyms) is to simplify the typical confusingly-broad product offering by including all the most important features, yet matching the price points of “less advanced” products currently available.
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