Nobody is buying CPOs. They're buying the pieces.

In March we published The consolidation game — a thesis about who would end up owning Europe's charging networks, and who would be selling them. Predictions are cheap. Marking them is not.

The window is 1 April to 11 August 2026: 19 weeks, and the period where our M&A tracker has systematic rather than retrospective coverage. It logged 86 European transactions. Thirty-eight of them were changes of control. The rest were capital raises, partnerships and joint ventures.

Four of the five calls landed. One hasn't. And the thing we didn't predict at all turns out to be the most useful signal in the whole dataset.

This is a carve-out market

Of the 38 European changes of control, we count 21 where the thing changing hands was a business unit, an asset portfolio or a product line — not a company.

Mer's Norwegian business-customer book. TotalEnergies' German commercial charging arm, more than 6 000 charge points, sold to Wolfsburg-based CUBOS. Vattenfall's German B2B charging division. GeniePoint's 228 locations, bought by InstaVolt from Equans. Stadtwerke Oberursel's entire public network — all 28 charge points of it. The elvah Hub product line, carved off and sold to chargecloud. Eleven E.ON Drive and Clever sites in Norway, sold to Uno-X on 11 August.

That is the tell. You cannot sell a loss-making CPO whole at a price the seller will accept. You can sell the profitable bits, the strategic bits, and the bits a buyer wants badly enough not to haggle. So that is what everyone is doing.

Exhibit A is Mer. Statkraft did not sell Mer. It took Mer apart.

Six transactions, five buyers, one utility that wanted out — and Statkraft still ends up with 43 per cent of the result plus two national businesses it hasn't managed to place. That is what "back to core" looks like when the asset won't clear as a single lot.

Prediction 1: the utilities sell. Verdict: hit.

We wrote that utilities on a back-to-core journey were the clearest sellers in the market. Twelve of the 38 European control deals had a utility, a municipal energy company or a utility-owned services group on the sell side. Roughly one in three.

The names read like a roll call of the European energy sector. Statkraft, six times over. Vattenfall, exiting B2B charging in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. Enel, demerging its mobility services unit out of Enel X. Lyse, handing its Rogaland and Agder fast chargers to Kople. Trollhättan Energi, selling roughly 60 charge points to Milepost. Stadtwerke Oberursel. Equans twice — its Dutch concessions to DigitalBridge and Aberdeen, then GeniePoint to InstaVolt. Aneo Mobility, merged into Elaway on 10 August under the new Joulia brand. And E.ON and Clever, selling out of Norway a day later.

Now look at the buyers. Kople is Cube Infrastructure. Milepost, Wirelane and Wattif are scale-hungry specialists. Uno-X is a fuel retailer. Every one of those is a category we named as a buyer. The trade we described is the trade that is happening.

European transactions by class, April to August 2026. August covers 11 days only. Source: Chargalytics M&A tracker.

The mix is shifting as well as the volume. In April, changes of control were 15 per cent of European deal flow. In July they were 78 per cent — 14 of 18 transactions. Partnership announcements fell to zero in July, which we'd read as a summer coverage quirk as much as a trend. The control-deal share is the robust signal: this market has stopped talking about collaboration and started buying.

Prediction 2: the oil majors keep shedding. Verdict: hit, with an Austrian punchline.

We flagged BP's Austrian sale as "still in progress" and argued the buyer would matter more than the seller. On 20 July, BP sold 100 per cent of bp Retail Austria to volenergy, the fuels arm of Switzerland's Volare Group: 250 retail sites, the Austrian charging infrastructure and the fleet-card business. About 115 of those sites are company-owned. The property advantage changed hands exactly as described.

Five days later, in the same country, Enilive agreed to buy OIL! Tankstellen and its roughly 320 stations across Germany, Denmark, Austria and Switzerland. Enilive is Eni's mobility arm, 30 per cent owned by KKR.

That is the thesis in miniature. We argued the vertically integrated national champions — Eni, Repsol, Galp, Orlen — would be the oil-sector players who actually run the forecourt transition, precisely because they never separated retail from upstream. Within one week, in one country, a British major sold its forecourts and an Italian one bought more.

The rest of the window is consistent. TotalEnergies sold its German B2B charging book. VAROPreem sold its majority stake in Amsterdam software firm Road at a stated 13 times planned 2027 EBITDA. CapVest took TSG private — 30 countries, 7 000 staff, €1.4 bn of revenue building and maintaining forecourt and charging infrastructure. Outside Europe, Adnoc agreed to buy Shell's South African downstream business. Nobody has reversed course.

Prediction 3: the listed pure-plays run out of road. Verdict: hit, but the exits are in Seoul.

Wallbox spent April in a creditor-led restructuring and July raising another €16m. Allego, already taken private by Meridiam, needed a further €100m from its owner in July. Fastned issued more bonds in May, as it does. EO Charging entered administration in April after a decade of trading and was bought out of it by Pod, EDF's UK operator. Enovates, once Belgium's largest charger manufacturer, went bankrupt and was relaunched in July by its founder with backing from Kees Koolen. Plug Charging, Wattif, InstaVolt and Powerdot spent the summer picking through the pieces.

What we got wrong was the geography of the upside. We predicted the first successful IPO of a charging portfolio by 2029, in Europe. In this window there were three charging listings and not one was European: Chaevi on KOSDAQ in April at a €580m valuation, Evoasis on the Taiwan Emerging Stock Board in May, EverOn filing for KOSDAQ in July. Europe produced zero charging IPOs and one restructuring. The exit window is open. It just isn't open here.

Prediction 4: capital concentrates. Verdict: hit, and harder than we wrote it.

We said the gap between winners and losers was widening and that everyone else was being starved. Twenty-four European rounds in the window carried a disclosed figure — about €2.56 bn across 22 companies.

Disclosed European funding, 1 April to 11 August 2026, EUR millions, aggregated by company. Source: Chargalytics M&A tracker.

Three companies took 73 per cent of it. The fourteen smallest — nearly two-thirds of the list — split €151m between them. That is about half of what InstaVolt raised in a single refinancing.

One caveat, because it matters: Zenobē's €1.38 bn is fleet and grid-storage debt, not public charging equity, and it flatters the concentration. Strip it out and the top three still take 53 per cent of what remains. The shape holds. Seed and Series A cheques in European charging software now run €2m to €5m — &Charge, NexiGO, eMabler, Volteum, Enera. Infrastructure money is measured in hundreds of millions. There is very little in the middle, and the middle is where most CPOs live.

Prediction 5: property owners take charging in-house. Verdict: not yet.

This was the call we were proudest of. The "most underappreciated trend," we wrote: landlords and retailers would stop renting car parks to CPOs and start owning the chargers themselves.

In 19 weeks of European deal flow, the number of retailers, shopping-centre owners or landlords that acquired a charging business is zero.

What we got instead were six retail-tagged partnerships, several running the other way entirely. Austria's EVN, a utility, signed with fuel retailer AVIA. Sweden's Skellefteå Kraft, a utility, signed with OKQ8. Hampshire County Council and Thurrock Council contracted Believ and Zest rather than building anything themselves. OKQ8's most notable property move of the period was selling a petrol station in central Lund to the municipality.

Our thesis put this phase in 2027 to 2030, so we are not late. But if it were arriving early we would expect the first small acquisitions now, and there aren't any. The single genuine data point in favour is Uno-X buying charging assets from two utilities — the right trade, arriving from the forecourt rather than the shopping centre.

The scorecard

And one more thing: nobody is publishing a price

Of the 38 European changes of control, exactly one came with a disclosed valuation: Easee, at NOK 1.6 bn, about €136m, bought by a shareholder who had been on the board since 2019. Every other deal closed on undisclosed terms.

Which is the same information vacuum we walked into when we valued the Mer-Eviny merger. Our Pulse methodology put Mer at 68 per cent of the combined operational value, and held that result across all seven scenarios we could construct. The deal gave Statkraft 43. The backtest against actual charging minutes landed at 65.9 per cent for Mer, 0.6 points off the model.

A 25-point gap between measured operational value and agreed deal value is not a rounding error. And in a market where 37 of 38 deals price in private, nobody outside the room can check the other 37. That is the argument for scoring networks rather than trusting headline terms. Operational excellence is not yet the primary valuation driver in charging M&A. Contract tenure, cost base and who needs the exit more still decide the split.

What we're watching next

Statkraft's leftovers. Mer Austria and Mer Business Germany are orphans inside a group that has publicly given up on charging. They will move.

Market-by-market retrenchment. InstaVolt sold its Iberian business to Powerdot and bought GeniePoint at home inside a fortnight, redeploying some of the Spanish hardware back to the UK. That is not retreat, it is the "five to eight operators per market" endgame arriving through subtraction. Expect the same trade in the Nordics and DACH.

The German roll-up. Germany produced nine changes of control, more than any other European market. CUBOS alone has taken ChargeOne's 3 500 charge points and TotalEnergies' 6 000-point B2B book inside three months, pushing it past 13 000. The German long tail is being consolidated in public, one portfolio at a time.

The antitrust clock on Eviny Elektrifisering. If it clears, Norway gets a dominant domestic fast-charging operator, and the brand question finally gets answered: Mer's measurably stronger execution record, or Eviny's leaner cost base?

We'll mark the next scorecard in six months. The thesis is holding better than we expected on the sell side. The buy side is a month or two behind schedule, and one category hasn't shown up at all.