Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1505694
12 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2023 Matties: Is this what helped drive the idea of bringing in more capacity to build your own circuits? When you look to expansion, what sort of window are you considering? Everybody has different levels or horizons of strategies. At SEL, we utilize a five-year roll- ing strategy. We plan and document where we want the company to be in this industry, and what technologies we'll advance based on what we see the market doing. Opportunities for vertical integration are always part of the discussions as we plan and set new strategies. e PCBs that go into our products probably have the most intellectual property of anything we design right now. ey really hold all our intellectual property together, when combin- ing our soware and the hardware and every- thing else that goes into our blue boxes. It's a big risk to send that out to somebody else, and there's nothing better than having our own PCB factory in our backyard to make sure that we can continue to ship products to our customers. We've all experienced supply chain chal- lenges in the past few years. People were try- ing to onshore as much as they could, and they How will we manage a wide-area power sys- tem five or 10 years down the road? en we have to align our sales force and manufactur- ing capabilities to address the needs that we're anticipating. Like anybody, sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong. We take the risk for the reward of making a little bit of profit. Matties: We keep hearing all the discussion about EVs and how fossil fuel will be a thing of the past. How does that news play into your longer-term strategy? e great part about our particular part of the industry is that we aren't necessarily concerned with how the electricity gets generated, or where it ends up being consumed. Our job is to manage how it flows through transmission net- works and distribution networks. Whether it's coming from a solar plant, a nuclear plant, or a gas turbine, that's all great. What's being called the "electrification of everything" is really good for our business, because we know how to man- age electric power and there will always be an increasing need for the control, monitoring, and optimization of power systems. SEL has incorporated their own products into their infrastructure.