It’s six in the morning, and Sarah’s phone buzzes.
If you saw AMPECO CEO Orlin Radev’s keynote at ICNC last year, you know Sarah, the fictional CEO of a mid-sized charging network. This year, she is back in 2026 with a board meeting ahead of her and one question to answer: What is our plan for the next 24 months?
That question sits at the heart of this year’s keynote, Get Big, Get Niche, or Get Out. The title is deliberately provocative, but underneath it is a much bigger argument about where EV charging is heading. The land-grab phase is ending. Consolidation is already reshaping national markets, and network operators are selling businesses, combining them, narrowing their focus, or preparing to acquire.
The industry is sorting itself out, and as an operator, deciding where you want to end up is only part of the challenge. The other part is whether your business is actually capable of getting there.
The strategic middle is getting uncomfortable
There will always be room for different kinds of EV charging businesses. What is becoming harder to sustain is the assumption that every operator can keep doing a little bit of everything while waiting for the economics to improve.
In his keynote, Orlin describes three increasingly visible paths:
1. Get big: Build enough scale to improve your economics, strengthen your negotiating position and become a network that drivers actively choose.
2. Get niche. Own a geography, use case, or customer segment and operate it better than a broader competitor could.
3. Get out. Sell, combine, refocus or otherwise make the strategic move that gives the business a stronger future.
None of those paths is inherently good or bad. The risk is drifting between them, because the economics of EV charging are becoming less forgiving. Operators can no longer count on scale to bring costs down on its own, on coverage to set them apart, or on growth to lead anywhere profitable. So the next phase of the market won’t be decided by who has the most chargers. It will be decided by what those chargers are doing.
Scale only works when the underlying business works
EV charging spent much of the past decade talking about scale as if it were an objective in itself: more locations, more markets, more charge points. But scale amplifies whatever is underneath it. As Orlin put it:
“Scale doesn’t fix a weak charging network. It multiplies it.”
A poorly performing network does not become fundamentally stronger because it doubles in size. Its weaknesses become more expensive. The same applies to operational complexity. Inefficient processes, when multiplied across countries, do not become efficient because the company is larger, just as low-performing locations do not suddenly become attractive because they sit within a bigger portfolio.
Real scale has value, of course. A large network operator can negotiate differently with hardware manufacturers, software providers, and service partners. A strong brand can influence driver behavior, and broader coverage can make subscriptions and loyalty propositions more compelling. But all of those advantages eventually come back to the same economic reality: utilization.
Orlin illustrated this with four fast-charging operators in Germany using broadly comparable high-power hardware. Their average daily energy throughput per charger ranged from roughly 110 kWh at the low end to around 300 kWh at the high end, with a break-even point of around 240 kWh per day. On those figures, only one of the four was above water. The hardware is broadly the same across the four; what separates them is location, pricing, brand, customer experience, and the operator’s ability to attract repeat usage.
“Consolidation only works if it buys utilization.”
Getting niche is more ambitious than it sounds
There is a tendency to treat specialization as the smaller option, but a focused operator that chooses one problem and solves it exceptionally well can build a much stronger position than a broader competitor trying to do everything. That focus could be on fleets and depots, kerbside charging, or a particular property type or customer segment. The advantage is not only having a smaller addressable market, but the clarity to design the business around one use case and operate it more efficiently than anyone else.
Velian is one example that “niche” does not have to mean small. It chose AC charging in the Netherlands and now operates 33,000 charge points. “Niche,” in their case, meant concentrating resources and operational expertise in one part of the market to reach scale within it.
An operator with a clear focus can design its operations, commercial model and technology around a specific use case, rather than carrying complexity that does not serve the core business. That focus can make the business strategically valuable, whether it remains independent or eventually becomes part of something larger.
“Getting out” is also becoming part of the industry’s maturation
This is the part of the conversation operators are usually least comfortable with, but not every exit means the same thing. Some EV charging businesses run out of runway. Others sell a market or business line to refocus on what works, while some combine because the economics are stronger together than apart.
The market is already seeing all three, and that tells us something important about the phase the industry has entered. For a long time, EV charging could be sold primarily as a growth story: build quickly enough, capture enough territory, and assume the value of the network would increase with its footprint.
Now, investors and operators increasingly have to answer a more traditional question: Does this business actually work? That means profitability, utilization, operational discipline, and a track record are becoming harder to separate from the growth narrative. Charging remains a growth market, but growth itself is no longer sufficient proof of value.
The 24-month problem
Whether an operator chooses to get big, get niche, or get out, all three paths eventually hit the same constraint: how quickly can the business actually change?
Take an operator that buys a competitor. The deal may create scale overnight, but it does not create one business overnight. What it first creates are two platforms, two apps, two billing environments, different hardware estates, different processes, and different customer experiences.
The real work starts after the transaction closes, when two sets of systems and operations have to become one. That is often the point when decisions made years earlier start to show their limits: a platform built for one market has to absorb another network, a custom system that once looked like an advantage becomes harder to integrate, and processes designed for a few thousand charge points are suddenly being asked to support twice as many.
That changes how you think about a 24-month plan. The question is not only where you want the business to be in two years, but what has to be true much sooner to make that possible. Can you absorb another network in months rather than years? Can you sell a clean business instead of an integration project? Can you consolidate operations without disrupting the customer experience?
“In a consolidation wave, your foundation is either something you can build on or something you work around for the next two years.”
Whatever strategy Sarah proposes to her board, the next question is unavoidable: how fast can we actually do it?
And that may be the defining management question for this phase of EV charging. A business with strong fundamentals has options: it can acquire or be acquired, specialize, enter a market, close underperforming sites, change its commercial model, or sell an asset without spending two years untangling it first.
That ability to pivot is easy to undervalue when the market is expanding quickly. It becomes extremely valuable once the market starts consolidating.
The upside comes after the fundamentals
There is another temptation in EV charging: to jump straight to the next revenue stream, such as grid services, energy optimization, or new services built around dwell time. Those opportunities are real. But Orlin made an important point about their order:
“That future is the reward for getting the basics right, not a shortcut around them.”
It is difficult to build sophisticated new revenue streams on top of an EV charging business that has not yet solved utilization, operations, or integration. That captures the broader shift taking place. The last era of EV charging rewarded expansion, whereas the next will reward execution.
There will still be some companies that become very large. There will be specialists who dominate carefully chosen segments, while others decide their best move is to combine, refocus, or exit. But whichever route they take, the strongest companies will have one thing in common: they will have built a business capable of changing direction without having to rebuild themselves first.
At the end of his keynote, Orlin returns to Sarah. Her successful 2030 does not come from predicting the market perfectly. It comes from an unglamorous decision years earlier to fix the foundation of the business so that, when the strategic moment arrived, the company could move.
“Change is risky. But in this market, not being able to change is riskier.”
Watch Orlin Radev’s full ICNC keynote, Get Big, Get Niche, or Get Out, above.
