FIMER: Italian solar inverters and storage for homes, businesses and utility plants

Overview

FIMER began in 1942 as a small Italian company and became one of the world's larger inverter suppliers when it bought ABB's solar inverter business. That business has a long lineage of its own: its history page traces the Terranuova Bracciolini operation from Plessey in 1969 through Magnetek (1991), Power-One (2006) and ABB (2013) to FIMER in 2020. Many installed ABB and Power-One inverters therefore lead back to FIMER for service and documentation.

The acquisition, completed in March 2020, brought manufacturing and R&D sites in Finland, India and Italy and about 800 employees in 26 countries. pv magazine reported that the combined company had about 1,100 employees, expected to ship more than 7 GW that year and called itself the fourth-largest inverter supplier. ABB's inverter business had earned around €340 million in 2019.

The expansion did not last. FIMER entered a court-supervised composition with creditors in Arezzo in 2022 and later extraordinary administration, and the business was sold in late 2024 to MA Solar Italy, part of McLaren Applied and owned by Greybull Capital. FIMER now describes 2026 as a year of transformation and strategic relaunch.

Offering

FIMER's current range, shown at Intersolar Europe 2025, covers residential, commercial and utility PV plus storage. The FIMER site also lists central inverters, turnkey stations, microgrid solutions, monitoring and control, software tools and service.

Residential

PowerUNO (single-phase) and PowerTRIO (three-phase) are hybrid inverters up to 10 kW with up to 98% efficiency and integrated arc fault detection; PowerTRIO was in certification in 2025. PowerX is a modular LFP battery scaling to 30 kWh with up to 6 kW of backup power.

Commercial and industrial

The PVS-10/33-TL string inverters cover 10 to 33 kW with export limitation and string monitoring. The PVM-75/125-TL covers 75 to 125 kW with up to 12 MPP trackers. The established PVS-100/120-TL delivers 100 kW at 400 Vac or 120 kW at 480 Vac from 1,000 V arrays, in two- and six-MPPT wiring-box versions with an IP66 enclosure. PVX is modular commercial storage up to 215 kWh with hybrid cooling.

Utility

In 2021 FIMER launched the PVS-350, a multi-MPPT string inverter with peak efficiency above 99%, and the modular PVS-260/PVS-300 conversion platform, which it claimed lowered levelised cost of energy by 2.3% against a central inverter design.

Technology

FIMER's commercial inverters are built for open monitoring. The PVS-100/120-TL product manual (revision G) documents one RS-485 port, two Ethernet ports and WLAN for service access, with SunSpec-compliant Modbus RTU and Modbus TCP. FIMER publishes a SunSpec PICS (protocol implementation conformance statement) for the family, listing which SunSpec models and points the inverter implements. That gives integrators a model-level register definition rather than a connector and a guess.

The exact rating and wiring-box suffix matter in practice: AC voltage, MPPT count and string monitoring differ between the 400 Vac and 480 Vac ratings and between the two- and six-MPPT boxes, so the type code is part of any point list.

Aurora Vision is FIMER's cloud platform for plant monitoring. In early 2026 FIMER added PowerPHAST (PHotovoltaic Array Sizing Tool), a simulation tool distributed through Aurora Vision that models expected PV and storage performance against how energy is produced, used and stored over time, with downloadable reports for installers and designers. The newer residential hybrids and PVM-75/125-TL add real-time monitoring, and the PVS-10/33-TL adds string-level monitoring and export limitation.

Markets

FIMER sells residential, commercial and utility PV equipment worldwide through distributors and installers. In 2021, at the height of the post-ABB business, it reported an installed base of more than 46 GW in more than 100 countries, a direct presence in 26 countries on five continents, three production sites, two research centres and 12 repair centres, according to SolarQuarter. The same report counted more than 35,000 EV charging stations installed, a line that no longer appears in FIMER's current navigation.

The footprint is smaller today. The business sold in 2025 comprised the Terranuova Bracciolini plant in Tuscany and six foreign subsidiaries in India, Singapore, Taiwan, Turkey, the United States and Australia, with 263 jobs preserved, as La Nazione reported.

The large installed base of ABB, Power-One and FIMER inverters is itself a market: owners of those fleets need replacements, firmware, documentation and service, and FIMER remains the source for them. Its 2025 product launches targeted Europe first, with residential hybrids and storage aimed at installers and commercial string inverters at rooftop and ground-mounted C&I plants.

Company

The FIMER business is operated by MA Solar Italy Srl, a sole-shareholder company registered in Milan, Monza Brianza and Lodi, with its registered office at Via Torri Bianche 9, Vimercate, and a second site at Via San Giorgio 642, Terranuova Bracciolini, as the site footer states.

FIMER SpA bought ABB's solar inverter business in a deal agreed in July 2019 and completed in March 2020, keeping the Finnish R&D hub and the Italian and Indian plants and continuing ABB-branded products under a trademark licence. Debt from that expansion led to a composition with creditors before the Arezzo court in 2022 and a creditor protection filing in February 2023, according to pv magazine; FIMER SpA was then placed in extraordinary administration. In July 2024, 55 of the 65 remaining staff at the Milan-area site were reportedly dismissed.

In November 2024 Italy's Ministry of Business and Made in Italy authorised the administrators to sell the business complex to MA Solar Italy, part of McLaren Applied Group, which is owned by Greybull Capital. The acquisition was formally completed in January 2025, with more than €50 million committed to finish the restructuring. Nick Fry, chairman of McLaren Applied, and Marc Meyohas of Greybull Capital commented on the deal. No separate FIMER management team has been published since.