Sinopec Ripped Out the Pumps. Fastned Ripped Up the Excuses.

The global view

For three years we have been asking the same question in public: what does it actually take for a CPO to make money? This week Fastned filed an answer. Q2 charging revenue of €35.9 million (+37%), 56.9 GWh delivered (+44%), and — the number that matters — operational EBITDA per station of €184,000 at a 48% margin, with ROIC climbing from 11% to 19%.

Revenue growing faster than the cost base is not a marketing slogan; it is the inflection the entire sector has been promising investors since 2019. The market noticed: shares rose 9.6%. It took 434 stations, a decade, and a refusal to chase port counts to get there.

Everywhere else, the constraint stopped being capital and started being aim. Germany's truck charging fund was five times oversubscribed in one call. France crossed 200,045 public points while its installation rate fell 27%. And in Shanghai, Sinopec excavated the underground fuel tanks at one of its own stations and put six 1,500 kW BYD chargers where they used to sit. Nobody is arguing about whether the money exists anymore. They are arguing about where to point it.

Europe

Start with Fastned, because everything else in Europe this week is a footnote to it. Operational EBITDA per station nearly doubled to €184,000, margins hit 48%, and the company signed a record 48 new sites while running 442 stations. This is what an execution score looks like when it converts into cash rather than press releases.

France, meanwhile, demonstrated the opposite discipline. The country passed 200,045 public charging points on 31 July, but H1 installations fell 27% year-on-year to 14,544 — a pace that lands France near 331,000 points by 2030 against a 400,000 target. Only 22% of the fleet is DC and 13% exceeds 150 kW, while energy delivered per point jumped 68% year-on-year in April. The chargers France already has are getting busier faster than it is building new ones, which is either a utilisation success story or a queueing problem, depending on which quarter you ask.

Germany found the demand instead. Its federal truck charging programme was comprehensively oversubscribed across all three opening calls: Call B drew roughly 1,050 applications seeking €400 million against €67 million available, Call C sought €500 million against €83 million. Berlin raised Call A's budget from €50m to €150m and still could not keep up. The €1 billion four-year programme is, on this evidence, badly undersized.

The UK spent the week arguing with itself again. More than 40 organisations warned the government that cutting the 2030 BEV requirement from 80% to as low as 50% would jeopardise billions already committed to plants, chargers and fleets. The awkward detail: BEV sales rose 44.5% in July and plug-ins are near 40% of the market year to date. Having already handed the industry a mileage tax from 2028, Westminster is now proposing to loosen the mandate that made the investment case work — the third curveball in as many years, as we noted in July.

And the software layer kept trading hands. The Mobility House sold its North American arm to EDF's PowerFlex in a share exchange, folding ChargePilot's 100+ MW and 150 fleet operators into PowerFlex's 70,000 charge points, and retreating to Europe to focus on V2G and storage. Sweden's Einride separately bought fleet charging software firm Flipturn for $38.4 million. Both fit the pattern from our M&A scorecard: nobody is buying CPOs, they are buying the pieces.

North America

The most consequential US network operator this week does not describe itself as a charging company. Walmart now has fast chargers at roughly 326 of its 4,600 US stores with about 300 more under construction, having passed Costco and Target — and since March 2025 it has run every site under its own brand rather than Electrify America's. It prices below the national average with loyalty discounts on top. When a retailer with the property, the footfall and no need for the electrons to carry the P&L starts building, the location score stops being a metric and starts being a moat.

Following up on our coverage last week, EVgo's Tesla arrangement now has specifications. The "EVgo Superchargers" are V4 units at up to 500 kW with Magic Dock for native CCS and NACS, Tesla handles operation and maintenance, and the sites appear in Tesla's in-car navigation and Trip Planner. Read that list again: EVgo supplies the brand and the metro real estate, Tesla supplies the hardware, the uptime and the demand routing. It is a franchise agreement wearing a partnership badge.

Florida's flying taxi gambit, which we first covered in July, has hardened into a filing. Documents obtained by the Miami Herald show FDOT wants to move roughly $197 million of NEVI money to 32 eVTOL vertiports at about $5.6 million each — airports, military bases, luxury apartments, golf courses — and the FHWA has agreed the state's corridors are built out. Florida has over 450,000 EVs, second nationally, and no commercial eVTOL service whatsoever. North Carolina is spending its allocation on chargers for apartment dwellers.

British Columbia put numbers on the C$700 million it committed in July: 3,500 public ports by 2035, up from 917 today, with 200 kW as the network standard, 400 kW at high-demand hubs, and plug-and-charge plus tap-to-pay throughout. Setting 200 kW as the floor rather than the ceiling is the quietly correct decision in a week full of loud ones.

China

The image of the week: Sinopec, China's largest fuel retailer with 30,000-plus stations, sent excavators to a petrol station at 1209 Huqingping Road in Shanghai, pulled the underground gasoline tanks out of the ground, and installed six dual-gun BYD 1,500 kW flash chargers across 12 bays. The engineering is the clever part: each charger is buffered by four Blade LFP packs of 169–185 kWh, so the site delivers megawatt-class output while drawing only about 100 kW from the grid. No substation upgrade, no interconnection queue, no eighteen-month utility conversation.

This is the first site under the June BYD–Sinopec framework deal, and BYD is targeting 20,000 flash charging stations in China by end-2026. Battery buffering is how China intends to skip the grid constraint that is currently rationing deployment everywhere else — including, as Germany's oversubscribed truck fund showed this week, in Europe.

Beijing also started cleaning up its own hardware. From 1 August, CCC certification is mandatory for EV supply equipment, banning uncertified chargers from production, sale, import and commercial use. The trigger was an April national inspection in which nearly half of 112 sampled charger batches failed. Existing units are grandfathered, but operators keep the safety liability — which, across 23.06 million connectors, is a great deal of liability to keep.

And the 15th Five-Year Plan we covered last week filled in its charging chapter: 50 GW of aggregated dispatchable V2G capacity by 2030, up 400% from 10 GW today, with time-of-use tariffs and a discharge-to-grid pricing mechanism. BYD says it can fit V2G to every model. GAC expects over 1.5 GWh of discharge this year. The pivot from selling electrons to selling flexibility, which we flagged in July, now has a price signal attached.

India

India's charger count reached 67,657 as of 7 August, including 1,139 battery-swap chargers, with GST on EVs and chargers cut to 5%. Set that against the other government number released this week: only 84 wayside amenities on the entire national highway network have charging, with exactly one added so far this fiscal year. Rajasthan leads with 20. Last week we noted that 6,562 PM E-DRIVE chargers had been approved and none installed; this week's data says the intercity corridor is where that gap is widest.

Delhi's answer is to make it somebody else's obligation. A new rule requires fuel marketing companies to offer an alternative fuel — CNG, LNG, biofuels, EV charging or swapping — at every third retail outlet within three years of commissioning, with a ₹10 lakh penalty per non-compliant site. Note the optionality: a CNG pump satisfies the mandate as neatly as a 150 kW charger, and costs considerably less.

Meanwhile capital is heading for the exit. Petronas-owned Gentari has put its Indian charging arm up for sale — 3,000 points across 11 states, partly run with Shell — after failing to offload half its Indian renewables portfolio. The counterpoint is domestic: Exicom grew consolidated revenue 61% to ₹331 crore, narrowed its EBITDA loss, and doubled Tritium's order book to $20.8 million with exports to ten new countries. Foreign strategics selling, Indian manufacturers scaling. That is a market changing hands, not shrinking.

Rest of Asia

Vietnam has turned July's promise into a draft. Two weeks after Hanoi ordered national charging standards by 30 September, the Ministry of Industry and Trade published the QCVN text itself, covering electrical safety, fire protection, siting, EMC, conformity marking and grid connection, effective 1 July 2027. Comments close on 20 August.

The pricing clauses are the interesting part. Every paid charger must display energy consumed, unit price, service fees, duration and total payable, with certified metering and tamper-proof data storage. That is a direct answer to the billing chaos exposed across China's five million chargers last month — and Vietnam is writing the rule before the mess rather than after it. Existing stations get six months to audit and 24 to fix; the country has roughly 150,000 ports, nearly all VinFast's.

In Singapore, ComfortDelGro bought out Engie's 49% of their charging joint venture, taking full control of 2,600 points across 800 sites in Singapore and Malaysia under the CDG Energy banner. Another European utility retreating from Asia-Pacific; another transport operator deciding it would rather own the electrons than rent them.

Oceania

New Zealand opened a second round of zero-interest concessionary loans worth about NZ$21 million, covering up to 50% of eligible capital costs over terms as long as 12 years. Round one delivered 2,574 points via ChargeNet and Meridian. It is a genuinely smart instrument — cheap capital against an asset with a long, slow revenue ramp is exactly what the demand curve requires.

The arithmetic is less forgiving. Getting from just over 1,800 points to the 10,000 target by 2030 means roughly 174 installations every month, without pause, for four years. New Zealand is at least funding the right constraint; France, this week, funded nothing in particular and slowed 27%.

Nio passed 120 million cumulative battery swaps, less than six months after its hundred-millionth, and unveiled fifth-generation stations in Quanzhou alongside its 4,000th. Its compact Firefly brand is approved for Australian sale — with no swap station on the continent. A swap-native car in a plug-only market is an interesting bet on how fast that changes.

South America

Latin America crossed 10,000 electric buses in more than 80 cities across 13 countries, per E-Bus Radar data from C40 and the ICCT. Santiago, São Paulo and Bogotá account for over 7,000 of them, and São Paulo added 500 in June alone under a 6.5 billion real programme funded by BNDES, the World Bank and the IDB. Depot charging, not highway charging, is where this continent is putting its megawatts — and depot charging is the one segment whose utilisation is knowable in advance.

Tesla is testing the passenger-car version of that thesis, launching in Uruguay in July and moving into Argentina, where it signed a June agreement with state oil company YPF to build fast charging, possibly with storage attached. Chinese OEMs hold roughly 90% of South American EV sales, so Tesla is arriving as the challenger for once. Outside Buenos Aires, the network is thin enough that whoever builds it defines it.

And in Cuba, a private microenterprise called Solguara opened the country's first rapid and ultra-rapid charging site, entirely off-grid on solar, on the National Highway near Santa Clara. Phone and lamp charging is free, which tells you what the blackouts are like. A new August policy exempts imported EVs paired with renewable charging from taxes and tariffs. When the grid is the problem, the battery-buffered island is the product — the same conclusion Sinopec reached in Shanghai, from the opposite end of the wealth distribution.

Africa

Nigeria produced this week's cleanest illustration of the difference between an EV policy and an EV market. The federal government approved tax waivers for nearly 4,000 imported EVs in H1, on top of a VAT exemption and zero import duties, targeting 60% fleet electrification by 2050. It is doing this with a national grid delivering about 4,000 MW for 200 million people and roughly 48 public charging stations — against South Africa's 500-plus.

Private capital is trying anyway. Hybrid Motors Nigeria says it has secured about $95 million in commitments for domestic EV manufacturing under the ACELY brand, two plants at 80,000 units of capacity, charging hubs in Lagos and Abuja, and single-digit driver financing. Vertical integration is not a strategic preference here; it is what you do when none of the layers exist yet. Motorcycle battery swapping from MAX and Spiro remains the workaround that actually functions at scale.

Morocco's problem is smaller and more tractable. Startup WATTSC launched watt.ma, a hardware-agnostic OCPP 1.6J management platform with local payment support, as the country pushes from around 600 stations towards 2,500 points by year-end. Building the software layer before the hardware arrives is either excellent timing or a very patient cap table.