EnergyVision Annual Report 2019

M I S S I O N A N D V I S I O N MISSION AND VISION MAK I NG GREEN WHAT WE ARE NOT: A SOLAR PANEL CONSTRUCTOR Five years ago, when EnergyVision started out, the founders went on a tour of the major banks. None of them wanted to get on board. Their responses ranged from “it’s not clear what you do” to “we don’t believe in what you want to do”. Two years ago, when we were working on one project after another in China, the same banks and other stakeholders came back to us: “How It’s true that we install solar panels on our customers’ roofs, but we are not solar panel constructors. To start with, we are not constructors - we are so much more than that. We think along with our customers, analyse energy bills, reflect on energy needs and desires, monitor current energy consumption, propose various formulas and technologies, map out everything in detail, calculate everything in detail, develop a multi-annual model for the final solution, finance the whole installation for many years and - yes - we build the is it possible for a bunch of young Belgians to do projects on the other side of the world and generate profits where big businesses don’t always succeed?” Last year, at the first meeting of the Board of Directors, we got a similar question: “Why do you succeed where your competitors fail? Why is Ener- gyVision making a profit when other solar panel constructors are not?” The answer was pretty simple: because we are not solar panel constructors. This year, several customers said to us at our first meetings: “Now I under- stand what you do. When I saw your website I thought you just installed solar panels on roofs.” Well, we do, but we do far more than just that. Because we kept on hearing the same questions, we will be completely overhauling our website in 2020, but above all we promise that we will try to explain exactly what we do, for once and for all. Why we gain market share so quickly, why we are expand- ing all the departments in the group, why we generate sustainable profits and why we are a strong, growing business. “For once and for all: no-stress energy solutions for all our customers, great and small. That’s what we do.” The question often crops up, in various forms: how do you manage to earn money in China, increase your market share in Morocco and create value in Belgium while your competitors are biting the dust one after the other? The short answer is: because we take a different approach to everyone else. Find out exactly what this means below. installation ourselves. But construc- tion is only one small aspect of what we offer. Somebody needs to get the panels up onto the roof and we prefer to keep control of that ourselves. Afterwards, we maintain and monitor the installation throughout its lifetime as well. What is more, solar panels are not the be-all and end-all. In fact it is our customers who are the be-all and end-all: we care about their needs and problems and we aim to come up with solutions that help them out. This often means solar panels. But not always: sometimes all they need is a simple lesson in energy efficiency, or a redesign of their lighting using LEDs. Sometimes it is a lot more com- plex than that. It is quite likely that we will be offering a completely dif- ferent technology in the future, and that is why we are strongly committed to R&D and never stop screening new products and technologies. The world is changing fast, and the energy sector is certainly in a state of con- stant change. We constantly adapt our knowledge, offering and business model to this changing context. ENERGY AFFORDABLE 14 15 E N E R G Y V I S I O N - A N N U A L R E P O R T 2 0 1 9