Everyone's Selling, Everyone's Buying, Nobody's Standing Still

The global view

The charging industry spent this week proving that the consolidation wave we mapped earlier this year is no longer a forecast — it's a fire sale. In Europe alone, four major deals reshuffled ownership of tens of thousands of charge points: Cubos swallowed TotalEnergies' German B2B business, Vattenfall offloaded its fleet charging to The Mobility House, InstaVolt dumped Iberia to Powerdot, and Norway's Statkraft and Eviny merged their networks into a single entity. The pattern is unmistakable — energy majors and generalists are retreating, while focused operators with clear geographic or segment strategies are consolidating at pace.

Meanwhile, Southeast Asia quietly assembled a charging ambition that rivals anything Europe announced this year. Grab committed to 6,000 ports across Vietnam, Malaysia set a 30,000-charger target for 2030, and South Korea began building a government-run Plug and Charge standard — the kind of interoperability infrastructure that Europe still debates in committee. In Australia, a single Telstra outage knocked chargers offline nationwide, a blunt reminder that connectivity resilience is as important as kilowatt capacity.

The week's sharpest irony? The companies building charging networks and the companies selling them have never looked more different — and they've never moved faster in opposite directions.

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Europe

This was the week European charging consolidation went from trend piece to trading floor. Cubos acquired TotalEnergies' entire German B2B charging business — roughly 6,000 charge points — bringing its total past 15,000 across more than 1,000 business customers. That's three acquisitions in six months (Swarco in December, ChargeOne in April, now TotalEnergies), and TotalEnergies is reportedly shopping its German public network too. When the second-largest oil company on the continent can't exit charging fast enough, the sector's centre of gravity has shifted.

Vattenfall followed the same playbook, divesting its B2B fleet charging operations in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands to Edenred subsidiary The Mobility House Solutions. Vattenfall will refocus on public charging, having recently acquired Nima Energy's Swedish fast-charging business. The message: even utilities are narrowing their bets rather than trying to do everything.

InstaVolt sold its Spanish and Portuguese operations to Powerdot, retreating from the Iberian market it entered just three years ago. Backed by fresh EQT capital — £250 million in debt refinancing plus £40 million in equity — InstaVolt is doubling down on the UK and Ireland, including new superhubs and BYD 240 kW hardware. As we noted when we mapped the consolidation game, geographic focus is becoming a survival strategy, not a limitation.

In Norway, Statkraft and Eviny are merging their EV charging businesses into a single company, combining Eviny Hurtiglading with Statkraft's Mer network. Four deals, one week, one conclusion: the era of everyone having a charging division is over.

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North America

Ionna, the automaker-backed charging joint venture, revealed it now operates 120 'Rechargery' locations across 31 states with 60 more under construction, targeting 30,000 high-speed bays by 2030. At 400 kW per charger and 39 cents per kWh — well below most competitors — the JV is using automaker capital to undercut the market on both power and price. Whether that pricing survives contact with a P&L remains the open question.

Walmart is pushing its in-house EV charging network into 29 states, up from 19 in January, with 612 stations already operational and a 10% discount for Walmart Plus members. At $0.46 per kWh before discount, it's not the cheapest electron in America — but it's attached to the country's most-visited retail footprint. Retail-anchored charging continues to look like the location advantage play we keep seeing in the data.

On the grid side, around 230 electric school buses fed power back to the grid during record US heatwaves via V2G programs. Oakland's 74-bus fleet alone is returning about 2.1 GWh annually. The school bus — America's most boring vehicle — is quietly becoming a grid asset.

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China

Chongqing released a 2026-2028 action plan targeting over 750,000 charging facilities — including 2,500 ultra-fast stations — to serve more than 2 million EVs. As we reported last week, China's national target is 40 million charging points by 2030; individual cities are now racing to claim their share of that number.

CATL launched the Tectrans II battery for light commercial vehicles, charging to 80% in under seven minutes with a one-million-kilometre warranty. Following up on the Swaptopus joint venture we covered last month, CATL also announced plans for 4,000 Choco swap stations across 190 Chinese cities this year. The company is building charging infrastructure in every direction simultaneously — fixed ultra-fast, battery swap, passenger, commercial.

In Sichuan, new-energy heavy trucks hit 27.5% of new freight vehicle registrations in the first five months of 2026, supported by over a million charging points already in the province. Germany is still awarding its first megawatt truck charging contracts; Chinese provinces are already living in that future.

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India

Delhi's government formally announced a target of 32,000 EV charging stations by 2030 under its new EV Policy 2026, a fourfold expansion from the current 9,000. When we covered Delhi's earlier 30,000-station commitment last week, the details were sparse — now we have specifics: priority locations at Metro parking areas, malls, and railway stations, with existing slow chargers slated for fast-charging conversion and solar-powered stations encouraged.

Separately, Kerala's state electricity board proposed 315 high-speed chargers across 277 locations, with 95% on private land via operator partnerships — a significant shift from its first phase, which relied on government land. The model matters: if Indian states can crack private-land deployment at scale, the infrastructure bottleneck loosens considerably.

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Rest of Asia

South Korea made the most structurally interesting move of the week. Hyundai signed an MOU with the Korean government to build a national Plug and Charge certification system — then hand over the technology and authority to the state for free. A major automaker building interoperability infrastructure and giving it away is rare enough to be notable, and it could give Korea a unified authentication layer that Europe still lacks.

Grab is investing in over 6,000 EV charging ports across Vietnam by early 2028, starting with operator Eboost and integrating charging into its driver app. Nearly half the ports are earmarked for Hanoi. It's the ride-hailing-to-infrastructure pipeline that Southeast Asia needs — drivers who charge daily are the utilisation floor that most CPOs dream about.

Malaysia set a national target of 30,000 EV charging stations by 2030, with utility Tenaga Nasional building dedicated substations for DC fast chargers. Combined with Delhi's 32,000 target and China's 40 million, Asian governments are now committing to charging numbers that dwarf European ambitions by an order of magnitude.

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Oceania

A Telstra network outage knocked EV chargers offline across Australia, hitting Chargefox (roughly 2,200 plugs), NRMA, and several other networks. Tesla fared best — under 15% of Supercharger sites affected — thanks to wired connections and Starlink backup. The Australian Electric Vehicle Association is now demanding mandatory fallback systems, tap-and-go payments, and chargers that default to free charging when connectivity drops.

The outage, caused by a time synchronisation failure across network nodes, also disrupted EFTPOS payments and regional train services. It's a clean illustration of what happens when charging infrastructure treats connectivity as a given rather than a risk. As our execution score framework emphasises, uptime and resilience aren't nice-to-haves — they're the difference between a network that works and one that doesn't.

In brighter news, Ampol CEO Matt Halliday acknowledged that petrol refining and retail is becoming less profitable as Australian EVs hit a record 23.3% market share in June. Ampol's 350+ charging bays can be profitable, he said, though margins are thinner than petrol. When the country's largest fuel company starts talking about phasing out petrol, the direction of travel is settled — only the timeline is open.

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Africa

CHARGE is building off-grid EV charging stations along South Africa's major transport corridors, using solar generation and battery storage to operate entirely independently of the strained Eskom grid. In its first month on the N3 highway, the infrastructure delivered 7,470 kWh — all off-grid. In a country where the grid is the bottleneck, going around it may be the only viable strategy.

Adnoc, acquiring Shell's South African downstream business, acknowledged EV charging at Shell Ultra City stations is a long-term goal but said the market isn't commercially viable yet. Meanwhile in East Africa, EVPLUGIN launched its first EV charging stations in Kigali, Rwanda, with plans to expand across every district — backed by government incentives including waived import duties and reduced electricity costs. Two countries, two charging realities, one continent.

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