Data Centre Investments and Modular UPS Systems Drive Market Penetration
The European UPS industry has a highly competitive landscape where one of the key challenges for a UPS manufacturer is to differentiate itself from its competitors. It is important for a manufacturer to keep up with new technologies and industry trends and come up with UPS solutions that cater to the growing needs of businesses. The power demand has been on a constant rise in the recent past and is a major area of concern for all end-user applications, especially those which have critical loads, such as data centres. Energy saving is one of the key challenges for the end-users of UPS systems. In the data centre segment, in particular, the main focus is on improving the power usage effectiveness (PUE), while being flexible enough to cope with constantly evolving needs in the face of rising energy bills, environmental constraints, and the increase in power density.
The other challenge is the need to address the scalability and flexibility issues among the end-users. It has become essential for manufacturers to come up with UPS products that will allow end-users to scale as and when they grow their business. Given the high demand for modular UPS systems and intense competition, it is quite important for UPS manufacturers to innovate in this space and come up with advanced modular concepts that allow further flexibility and modularity. Right-sizing backup power has for long been an unmet need for end-users. Businesses face the challenge of anticipating their growth over time, which eventually leads them to face issues with the backup power requirement.
There is a trend where end-users tend to deploy a UPS system configured for a larger power range to accommodate future growth. There are two key challenges associated with this issue. The first one is they end up paying for the additional power they will not use initially. The second issue arises when they do not grow their business as anticipated. Modular UPS systems address these challenges effectively with their inherent flexibility and scalability, that is, modules can be added or made redundant according to requirement. The modular rack mounting configuration offers customers the advantage of swapping a faulty module with a new one without interruption to the working process of the whole UPS.
The European UPS market was worth $2,200.0 million in 2019. The market is in its maturity stage. The market is expected to grow at a slow pace for the next two years. Growth rates are expected to further accelerate after 2022. The modular UPS segment is expected to grow nearly twice as fast as the traditional UPS systems segment. The UK and Germany are the two biggest countries for UPS revenues in Europe; together, they accounted for 38.0% of the total market in 2019. These are also expected to be the two fastest-growing countries in Europe.
