Ampol is buying one of the country’s largest electric vehicle charging operators, a pivot for the petrol station giant as a months-long conflict in the Middle East pushes up the cost of fuel and sends EV sales surging.
The ASX-listed petrol retailer and refiner will acquire Evie’s national charging network for $225 million, adding more than 1030 charging bays to its portfolio and creating a combined platform of 1425 sites.
The Australian Financial Review’s Street Talk column reported in June that Evie, which is backed by former coal baron Trevor St Baker, had enlisted corporate advisory firm Tallarook to help auction the business.
“Evie’s high-quality, attractive long-term tenure sites with established grid connections and some with expansion capacity, provides Ampol with an opportunity to grow its charging footprint at scale and at pace,” said Ampol’s managing director and chief executive Matt Halliday.
EV sales eclipsed those of petrol cars in August for the first time, as government subsidies, a sustained rise in fuel prices and a flood of cheap Chinese imports upended the market. Still, there are far fewer chargers compared to Europe and China, with about 4200 locations servicing more than 600,000 EVs, according to the Electric Vehicle Council.
Ampol, which operates a 100-site network called AmpCharge, said it had seen a 116 per cent increase in charging sessions year-on-year, alongside a 120 per cent increase in energy supplied in the first half of the year.
“This gives us confidence in the strength of the business case that complements our traditional fuels business,” said Halliday.
Ampol’s aquisition of Evie comes after the company, which was founded in 2017, drew the attention of several infrastructure and private equity funds as well as Chargefox, owned by motoring clubs including NRMA and RACV.
Its locations are spread across shopping centres, highway rest stops, fuel stations and fast-food chains in major cities and regional hubs.
Evie previously had a partnership with Ampol to install its ultra-fast chargers at some petrol station sites in NSW and Victoria.
Ampol is the latest major Australian retailer pushing into EV charging, with Coles earlier this year outlining plans to bring dozens of sites to its supermarkets. Coles announced the move in July, as part of a partnership with Evie, which it hoped would attract shoppers to its stores.
EV sales in Australia surged to a record in June and accounted for more than one in five new cars sold. This was driven by sales of BYD and Tesla. EVs now account for 23.5 per cent of total new car sales – doubling since February – according to Evie’s annual driver survey conducted in May.
Once seen as the preserve of inner-city drivers, EVs have become increasingly popular as the conflict in the Middle East – and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz – has sent the price of Brent crude past $US100.
Rising fuel prices have provided a boon for Ampol, which recorded a fivefold surge in profit in the six months to June 30 to $857.2 million. The company quadrupled its dividend payout to investors, while its share price has climbed more than 34 per cent this year, and closed at $43.09.
Ampol operates Queensland’s Lytton refinery, one of only two fuel refineries in Australia, which processes roughly 109,000 barrels of oil per day.
In a note to clients, Morgan Stanley analysts said they estimated that Ampol had paid the equivalent of 10 weeks of refinery margins for Evie. The investment bank’s research indicates that battery-run EVs would make up around 40 per cent of new car sales in Australia by the end of the decade, and make up more than 10 per cent of the total fleet.
Extracted in full from: https://www.afr.com/companies/transport/ampol-goes-large-on-ev-charging-in-225m-purchase-of-evie-network-20261001-p611yk
