Decimation of the charger market?
or, how consolidation might happen
(Apologies for the slightly long post this week, but I figured the paying Patreon subscribers should get their money’s worth with this one)
Introduction
I was at the UK Charging Infrastructure Symposium at the British Motor Museum last week.
One of the presentations was by Alex Georgianna from Grace Automotive Ltd who was looking at CPO profitability/ viability.
Alex has looked at thousands of publicly available data points related to CPOs and run some interesting analysis related to things such as profitability, utilisation and coverage.
The data tell a very interesting story about how these entities are financed.
At the heart of it is the calculation that determines how profitable each CPO is. Using a figure called EBITDA (which is the key indicator of how much money the operation makes before things like tax are levied - most CPOs are losing money) he showed there are just 2 companies making profit and neither of these are particularly large CPOs.
But what’s more important is the extent of the loss a lot of these are making. Using a calculation that links the loss to the market capitalisation, he determined that there are companies that are losing three or four times their market capitalisation per year.
