Every journey begins with the first step. For Ralf Hofmann and a dozen engineers, one step was not enough. They wanted more. At the turn of the year 1998/1999, they left the KACO group to start a separate company that was solely dedicated to photovoltaics. They brought with them a lot of ingenuity and enthusiasm as well as decades of experience from KACO, which was already the world’s largest supplier of electromechanical choppers in the 1950s, the predecessors of today’s solar PV inverters. Now, KACO new energy is one of the world's largest manufacturers in the PV business. It is a Swabian success story!