Is Chinese charging coming to Europe? And if so, how?

If a headline about NaaS Technology buying Sweden’s Charge Amps for $66.4 million crossed your feed this week, check the date. The deal was signed on 22 August 2023 and terminated three months later. The old story resurfaced in news feeds with a fresh timestamp. Old deals make convincing new headlines.

The real news came in July, and almost nobody noticed. An arbitration tribunal in Stockholm ruled that NaaS had breached the agreement by failing to complete it, and awarded damages to four of the sellers (NaaS 6-K, 17 Jul 2026). So the one time a Chinese charging company signed to buy a European one, it walked away, and then it got the bill.

That’s an odd footnote for an industry whose carmakers sold one in seven new cars in Europe in September. So we asked the obvious question: is charging next? We went through our M&A tracker, our charger catalogue, the public registries that name the hardware, and China’s own market numbers.

The short version

• The car playbook hasn’t reached charging. Chinese brands went from 1.7% of European new-car sales in 2022 to about 14.5% in September 2026. In charging, Chinese investors have taken a handful of minority and seed stakes in European companies, and made one takeover attempt. It collapsed.
• The push from home is real. China built more public chargers than its operators can fill. Service fees in some big cities sit below cost, the market leader TELD barely makes money without subsidies, and public charger additions fell 39% in January–July. TELD’s parent nearly tripled its overseas revenue in 2025.
• The way in is the box, not the buyout. Companies headquartered in China make 388 of the 1 390 charger models in our catalogue, and a third of the models rated 150 kW and up. In Greece’s public registry, Chinese brands account for 13% of the charge points with a named maker.
• The loudest moves are carmakers’. BYD now promises 3 000 megawatt chargers in Europe by the end of 2027, a year later than it said in the spring. XPeng promises more than 4 000 high-power points by 2028. NIO built about 60 swap stations and has stopped. China’s two biggest operators, TELD and Star Charge, run no networks of their own in Europe.
• Brussels has drawn a line for inverters. Since May, EU money no longer funds energy projects that use inverters from high-risk suppliers. Chargers aren’t covered yet, but EU law already counts them as a net-zero technology and their operators as critical infrastructure.
• Our read: Chinese charging is arriving the way Chinese inverters did, inside other people’s projects, and it will keep doing so until Brussels decides a charger is an inverter with a cable. Four scenarios below.

The full story

The car playbook: buy the brand, then ship the cars

Chinese carmakers didn’t knock. They bought the house. Geely paid $1.8 billion for Volvo Cars in 2010 (Volvo Cars), then picked up Lotus, the London taxi maker, half of smart and, through its founder Li Shufu, almost 10% of Daimler. Those deals bought brands, engineering and dealer networks. The cars came later.

And the cars came fast. In the third quarter of 2026 Chinese brands outsold the Japanese in Europe for the first time, 12.7% against 11.9% (Dataforce via Bloomberg). Tariffs of up to 35.3% on Chinese battery-electric cars, on top of the usual 10%, mostly changed what got shipped. Monthly EU imports of China-built hybrids went from 3 800 in October 2024 to about 83 000 in July 2026.

The playbook has moved on since Volvo, though. This year’s deals are minority stakes in under-used European factories: Geely’s 34% of Ford’s Valencia plant for €221 million, and Gotion’s 49% of Volkswagen’s Sagunto battery plant. Chinese money is building rather than buying. It invested €16.8 billion in the EU and UK last year, the most since 2018, and 93% of the automotive share went to the EV supply chain (MERICS and Rhodium).

Charging’s one takeover attempt

On paper, NaaS was the right buyer. It ran China’s largest third-party charging platform, with 575 000 connected chargers in 2023, and said Charge Amps’ wallboxes and sales channels would be its base for Europe. The price was generous: about twice what Charge Amps’ own shareholders had valued it at three months earlier, after a year in which that valuation fell 76% (Realtid).

Neither side ever said why the deal fell apart, but we know how it ended. In July a tribunal under the SCC Arbitration Institute found that NaaS’s Swedish subsidiary, Fleetin AB, had breached the purchase agreement by failing to complete it. It held NaaS itself liable under its parent-company guarantee. The damages haven’t been disclosed.

NaaS has shrunk since. It has pulled back to an asset-light platform at home, and its 2025 annual report doesn’t mention any business abroad. At the share price used in a July 2026 share deal, the whole company was worth about $51 million, less than it once offered for Charge Amps. Charge Amps stayed with its Swedish owners, including the cooperative OK and the utility Skellefteå Kraft, and launched a new wallbox last month.

NaaS isn’t an outlier. In our M&A tracker, Chinese investors buying into European charging amount to a handful of minority and seed stakes plus that one failed takeover. The biggest are two rounds for ELMI Power, a Frankfurt–Shanghai battery-buffered charger start-up led by HongShan, formerly Sequoia China. Most of the money has flowed the other way. ABB took control of Shanghai’s Chargedot in 2020, and agreed in 2025 to sell 60% of it to Shenzhen-listed Mentech. Eaton invested in Shenzhen’s EN+, and ABB E-mobility in the operator YKC. BMW and Mercedes set up the IONCHI fast-charging venture in China, which TELD builds for.

Why they’d come: a price war at home

China has more chargers than everyone else put together, and that’s the problem. At the end of August it had 24.2 million charging points, 5.16 million of them public (NEA via China Energy News). In 2025 alone it added about 1.3 million public points, five times as many as Europe, according to the IEA.

The line in the chart looks like good news for operators: almost ten electric cars per public charge point, up from six in 2020. It isn’t, because most of those cars charge at home. Private chargers make up 79% of China’s charging points, and the public operators fight over what’s left by cutting prices. The two largest, TELD and Star Charge, reported utilisation of about 10% in their Hong Kong listing documents. In Hefei and Wuhan, TELD’s service fee of 0.16–0.25 yuan per kWh is below the industry’s cost of 0.25–0.35 yuan (36Kr, from the prospectus). One Guangdong operator described what happens when a 480 kW site opens across the road: the station’s daily sales fell from about 3 000 kWh to under 800.

At the top, the economics are thin. TELD runs about 900 000 public charge points, roughly a fifth of China’s. It lost money every year from 2020 to 2022, made RMB 291 million in 2024, and 61% of that came from subsidies. Star Charge carved its charging operations out of the company before filing for a Hong Kong listing, which tells you what its bankers thought investors would pay for running chargers. That prospectus lapsed in July.

So the growth is going abroad. TELD’s parent, Tgood, nearly tripled its overseas revenue in 2025, to RMB 1.36 billion, and says it is listing in Hong Kong to fund its international expansion. Star Charge already earns almost a fifth of its revenue outside China and calls Europe its cornerstone. Back home, building has slowed: China added 382 000 public charge points from January to July 2026, 39% fewer than in the same months of 2025 (our calculation from NEA stock figures).

Price is what draws them to Europe. In 2024 a 120 kW DC charger sold for RMB 30 000–50 000 in China and about RMB 464 000 abroad, according to Industrial Securities (via China Daily). Certification, installation and margin explain part of that gap, but not all of it.

How they’re getting in: four routes, none of them a takeover

Route one: the box. On the supply side, Chinese makers already lead. Of the 1 390 charger models in our catalogue, 388 come from 53 companies headquartered in China, more than the US and Germany combined. Among models rated 150 kW and up, Chinese makers have a third. These are counts of models, not of installed chargers. A catalogue shows who is selling, not who is buying.

Installed hardware is harder to see, because most registries don’t record who made the charger. Greece’s does, for two-thirds of its public charge points. Chinese brands account for 13% of those. Autel is the fifth most common name on the list, ahead of Wallbox and Alpitronic, and IoCharger, Sungrow and Huawei add the rest.

Below the badge sits a layer almost nobody discloses. DC chargers are built around power modules, and Chinese makers such as Winline, which has had a Berlin office since 2022, Infypower and UUGreenPower sell them by the hundred thousand. Few charger brands say whose modules they use, so how much of a ‘European’ charger is Chinese is something nobody can measure from the outside yet.

Route two: someone else’s logo. Star Charge’s main route into Europe has a French name on it. Its joint venture with Schneider Electric sells chargers, inverters and storage as Schneider eStar. In June CATL did the same with Octopus Energy, setting up Swaptopus to build battery-swap hubs for electric trucks. The first UK sites are due in 2027 (electrive). The European partner brings customers, grid connections and a familiar name on the tender form.

Route three: the carmaker’s own network. The loudest moves come from carmakers, and so far most of them are announcements. BYD opened its first 1 500 kW Flash Charging site in Germany in June. Earlier this year it talked of 3 000 in Europe by early 2027. At the Paris show this month that became 100 by the end of 2026 and 3 000 by the end of 2027 (CarNewsChina). At home, it has opened about 34 a day since April. XPeng has promised more than 4 000 high-power charge points in Europe by 2028, built in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with ELMI Power, the start-up HongShan backs.

NIO is the warning. It built about 60 battery-swap stations in Europe, most of them in Norway and Germany, and then sold 19 cars in Germany in the first eight months of 2026 (electrive). It is building no new swap stations in Europe this year, apart from one near Oslo, and it closed its Danish station last November. A network that serves one brand lives or dies with that brand’s sales.

Route four: buying in. NaaS tried it once. The table shows everything else we could find, and most of it isn’t a takeover.

The wall next door

Europe has already made up its mind about Chinese power electronics on its grid; it just hasn’t said so about chargers. Chinese vendors supplied 78% of the inverters installed in Europe in 2023, according to DNV figures cited by E&E News. Lithuania then barred Chinese companies from remote access to solar, wind and storage sites above 100 kW. In May the Commission stopped EU money, including EIB and EBRD loans, from funding energy projects that use inverters from high-risk suppliers, and called it a first step (Euronews).

Electrically, a DC charger is a grid-connected power converter with a modem and a cloud backend. That’s the same risk profile as an inverter. Last year Ruter, Oslo’s public transport operator, found that Yutong, the Chinese maker of its electric buses, could reach them remotely for updates and diagnostics. Swap ‘bus’ for ‘charger’ and ‘software update’ for ‘firmware update’, and you have the question Brussels hasn’t asked yet.

The legal hooks are already in place. The Net-Zero Industry Act lists “electric charging technologies for transport” as a net-zero technology, which can bring resilience criteria into public tenders once a single country supplies more than half of the EU’s needs. NIS2 already treats charge point operators as critical entities with supply-chain duties. The proposed Industrial Accelerator Act sets conditions for large Chinese investments in EV, battery and solar plants, such as minority ownership and a mostly European workforce, but it doesn’t mention chargers. For now these rules sit side by side, and none of them yet applies to Chinese chargers.

Four ways this plays out

Our read: the box is already here, and the wall will decide how big it gets. The carmaker networks make the headlines, but they stand or fall with car sales, and only a handful of today’s Chinese models can use a megawatt charger at full speed. Our analysis of charging speed found that every car in our catalogue launched since 2024 that accepts 500 kW or more comes from a Chinese maker.

The bargain bin is the scenario to watch, because it’s the one that would look most like cars. European charger valuations have fallen hard, and Charge Amps lost 76% of its value in a year before NaaS turned up. Chinese hardware groups are raising money in Hong Kong. NaaS showed that walking away from a European deal costs money. The next buyer is likely to have deeper pockets, and better lawyers.

What we’re watching

• BYD’s European site count on 31 December, against the 100 it promised in Paris.
• Tgood’s Hong Kong listing, and how much of the money it earmarks for Europe.
• The Commission’s next step after inverters, and whether it names chargers.
• The size of the NaaS award, if anyone ever discloses it.

The cars arrived loudly. Chinese charging is arriving in crates, and most of those crates don’t have a Chinese name on them. Every deal mentioned here is in our M&A tracker, updated daily.

Sources