(Bloomberg) -- Kempower Oyj’s chief executive officer is pleading for six more months of patience from investors who have witnessed a plunge of more than 80% in the Finnish charger maker’s market value over the past year to just over €500 million ($530 million).
Its expansion was stunted after rapid growth in 2022 and 2023 as companies that had bought large numbers of electric-vehicle chargers struggled to install them, pulling the brakes on new orders, CEO Tomi Ristimaki said in an interview.
Kempower’s existing customers have about €80 million worth of excess stock which will decline slowly through the first half of 2025, hampering order intake, the CEO said. Net sales growth will follow once those stockpiles are installed, he said.
Recently, installations have been picking up slightly, but “it’s not yet enough to digest the existing inventories,” Ristimaki said.
A broader deterioration in the EV market in Europe is less of a concern for the CEO, given the number of installed chargers remains too low for the existing fleet of battery-powered cars, he said.
The maker of high-speed chargers is also selling in the US, and held an official opening of a factory there in June, six months after producing its first EV chargers there. That’s still in infancy — the US market made up only 9% of revenue in the first nine months of the year, with Europe accounting for 86%.
“By 2030, we expect these to be almost equal,” Ristimaki said.
Kempower now needs to show “impressive development” in the North American market given the company’s “large investments” in an assembly factory there, said Henri Parkkinen, an analyst at OP Corporate Bank in Helsinki. He’s among a minority of analysts recommending clients buy the stock.
The prospect of Donald Trump’s second term as US president has some on the market projecting further slowing of electric-vehicle adoption given his aversion to green policies, but some argue Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk’s donations and role in his campaign may temper the outcome.
Kempower’s Ristimaki sees no major change in the market outlook for charger makers. While the current National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program is based on a bi-partisan law and is thus likely to remain, “I don’t expect to get huge new programs happening in the next four years,” he said.
Even as NEVI will likely put the US back on course to meet its 2030 target of 500,000 chargers, the country will need “at least three times this number” to cater the growing EV fleet by that year, according to a BloombergNEF forecast.
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