Hi, everyone. Welcome to Friday at the 26th Annual Needham Growth Conference. Thanks for joining us. My name is Chris Pierce in the Needham Research Department, covering EV OEMs and EV charging equipment. It's my pleasure to welcome Mathieu Bonnet, CEO of Allego. He's coming to us from the Netherlands this morning.
Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. Why don't you, could you just give us one or two minutes kind of top-down overview on the company, and we'll get into some Q&A? And if anyone listening has any questions, you can email them to me at cpierce@needhamco.com, or put them into the portal that you see at the bottom of the screen. Welcome.
Great. Thank you very much, Chris, and happy to be with you this morning. A few words about Allego and myself s o I'm Mathieu Bonnet, the CEO of Allego since 2019 now, and Allego is a company in EV charging space. We are building, owning, and operating public charging EV stations all over Europe, basically focusing on fast and ultra-fast charging station. I guess during the question, I will explain why we are focusing on that. We are already active in 16 countries, so we are one of the major player over there and the largest one with the footprint.
We try to serve and support this this great growth we see in Europe with now in 2023, more than 2 million full battery to electric vehicles sold with a 30% growth compared with 2022. Of course, we have stronger tailwinds in Europe because of regulations with a ban of any ICE car sold as of 2035 s o that's the reason why the trend is quite quite high. The challenge for us is really to put enough chargers and to provide enough energy to this car to make it happen smoothly.
Okay. And can we kind of start just sort of investor expectations or enthusiasm for EV adoption? You know, from your seat, sort of what do you see and how do you frame it? Because we've had investors sort of get very enthusiastic or perhaps overly enthusiastic about EV OEMs and EV charging in 2021.
And kind of towards the end of 2023, we've seen a lack of enthusiasm. L ike, how do you think about... You know, you cited some statistics about EV growth, the mandates from the government l ike, what do you look at as far as EV adoption? Sort of what kind of makes, you know, what grounds you that, you know, the adoption is coming and change is coming?
Well, first of all, that's the figures. Really now we, when we look at the last, the last months and the last quarters, we are over 18% of full BEVs sale in Europe. I t's growing and it's keep growing. T hat mean that, really the trend is here to stay. And it's just not a trend or a fad because everything is done in Europe in order to push the drivers and the consumer to shift to EVs o f course, there are subsidies and heavily subsidized, as in the U.S., by the way, we could compare with the U.S. a few years ago.
N ow the subsidies are going down because, basically speaking, we have much more, EVs models, which is very important because, of course, you need to offer some choices to the, to the customers. And now, what we see is that we see much more full battery electric vehicle, new models compared with ICE cars.
A ctually, you have more choice now than, than before, and comparing to ICE, it's, it's quite, quite interesting. In Europe, all the OEM, they have really shift to EVs, meaning that they are not developing really new ICE car models. So that's the reason why, as well, for the customer now, I'd say it's, really a no- no-brainer a nd when we talk to people, they say: "Okay, I want to change my car, and it's not a question of if I am going to stick with an ICE car, but I'm going to shift to EV t he question is which one?
Okay. Okay, so from your perspective, you know, the war is sort of over or the battle has been sort of won by EVs, and it's something that there may be, you know, questions about the rate of change, but there's no kind of going back, and EV adoption is kind of... You, you know, Europe will look like Norway or Scandinavia in, we'll call it five, 10 years, where it's 85% of new cars sold are EVs.
Absolutely. O f course there is no way with 85, but, if you look at all the Nordics, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, it's over 35%-40%. W e have, we have some scales, Southern Europe, it's lagging compared, but it is picking up right now. So I think, yes, the shift is here, and, and we'll be there.
What's, Can you kind of give us some background on the European charging market versus the US charging market? You know, so in the US, we've got a lot of different players, similar to what you have in Europe, but you have, you know, the federal government stepping forward with something called NEVI, where they're trying to put EV chargers every 50 mi on the highway, within 1 mi of the highway, to kind of reduce range anxiety, to further push adoption. Are there similar programs in Europe, or are, are we already beyond those programs? Because, you know, we're consumers already-
W e are, Chris, we are beyond this program. They are the same as as you've just mentioned with with NEVI five to six years ago, in order to connect big highways and big corridors in Europe. It was supported by the EU, but now this, well, these grants are down.
B asically speaking, because of where you see with all these cars, well, the model is here to be sustainable. And I would like to emphasize that we are already operational positive for three years in a row with our locations, because we have enough utilization rate high enough and enough car coming to our station. So it mean that we don't need any longer this kind of support, you know, to make it happen.
Y ou're further along the utilization curve than the U.S., where, you know-
Yes.
There's-
Basically, yes. Basically speaking, when you look at the market, it's double the size of the US in terms of sales and in terms of EV penetration. And, utilization rate, when you look at the last months of last year, 2023, we are at utilization rate north of 18%. So it's on our ultra-fast charger s o yes, it's higher than in the U.S.
Did you say, just to confirm, 18%?
18%, yes.
Okay, y ou know, 1/5 of the day the chargers are utilized.
Okay, perfect.
H ow do you kind of, you know, since we're talking about NEVI and kind of connecting the countries in Europe as well, these are fast chargers, and that's sort of what you kind of led with. Can you talk about, you know, maybe as a potential where the US might go, because did the... Did Europe go through an AC charging kind of, I don't want to call it a fad, but was there a thought that AC charging would dominate, and then instead it's become DC charging that's dominated? Or is there still healthy or has there still been healthy growth in AC charging?
Well, I think there is here a big difference with the US and Europe, is that AC, of course, and when I talk AC, public AC, so slow charging as 22 kilowatts. But home charging, office charging was very strong in terms of, of course, proportions a few years ago. But now more and more it is shifting to public one first, and fast, which is 50 kW for us, and ultra-fast, higher than 100 kW.
I think that's different compared with the US because the cities are denser, so it's very difficult to put new slow charger, public slow chargers. So that's the reason why we begin to see some hubs with ultra-fast charging station around the cities. W hen you need to really charge on a public c harging stations, you don't want to be stuck six hours with your car somewhere, except if you can find a charger in front of your door. But in terms of civil works, it cannot work, because you just can't put the charger anywhere.
Just imagine New York, if you had to put a charger on all 10 m, it doesn't work. So that's the reason why the ultra-fast charger are here and heavily used now. And because cars are used not for secondary car but the first car, you need to use your car to go from city A to B, and you need to charge on the go s o that's the reason why as well it is needed, and that's the development we see them right now.
How has sort of consumer behavior changed because... Or how have they accepted the change? Because if I think about the one thing, the difference in the U.S. is where I think about daily range replenishment, whether, you know, someone has a garage and they have a, an AC charger, that's less prevalent in Europe or charging at work, what you talked about. It's hard to put in kind of the charging in the older infrastructure.
Do consumers spend more time at a DC, like, fast charging station now versus what they used to when they used to fill up with gasoline? Like, how has the market kind of grown up? Is it destination charging, where the consumer makes a planned stop and spends more time because it's going to take more time? Has there been consumer pushback to that, or it's sort of been a smoother process?
Well, two things. First of all, I think right now there is a lack of choice. Meaning, if you need to charge, you need to find somewhere to charge.
Okay.
T he quicker, the better. So that's the reason why even if they can stay 15 minutes, well, it's better than nothing s o they, if they stay 15 minutes, that's basically what we see with our ultra-fast charging to over 200 kW when the car can make it.
That's the reason why we want to offer something to do. So our locations are well positioned in terms of what we call premium sites, with a software to look at and to forecast the traffic with destinations. T hat we can w ith retailers, and we can offer some shops or whatever s o they are not going to spend three hours, but half an hour or 20 minutes, and they have something to do. And it works. It really works.
Is that a figure you said that the average charge time is 15 minutes? So your average time spent-
Yes, yes.
Okay.
15 minutes. The real utilization, that's between 10 and 15 minutes. That's what we see now.
Okay. Okay, and then do you... t hese retailers, these destinations where you kind of- where you have your charging set up, do they... You know, you own the... How does it work? Where you own the, a part of the real estate, or you rent the real estate but you own the equipment, and the, the retail customer- the retail destination doesn't wanna put their own brand on the charger or own the customer? Like, how does this, the market kind of grown up?
Yeah. W e can have different model, but most of the time, we lease. L ong-term lease, 15 or 20 years now, we sign. T hese retailers are happy that we invest. W e invest our own charging station-
Okay
... and we have our own branding v ery few are using their branding t hey are not so much interested by that. They know that we bring a new service for their customers, so that's fine for them. T he trade-off is we do it like that and we, I would say, we set the terms w e share a kind of 1%-2% revenue share with them just for the for the cost of the lease. And but they are happy to have this, because well, honestly speaking, the retailers, depending which ones, but now there are other issue that investing in, by the way, in charging stations s o that's a very peculiar well, activity.
W e are here to do that b y the way, coming back to the office, maybe that's different in the US, but with what's going on, you know, with homeworking, well, and the difficulties with low occupancy, well, the landlords, they don't want to invest any longer in even slow chargers in the parking garage.
Okay. So you're, you know, you guys bear the CapEx kind of, I don't want to say a burden-
Yeah
... but then you have the benefit as utilization kind of grows. Is that the right way to think about it?
Yes. And we are in charge, so we can choose whatever price we want, kind of pricing we want s o we are free to do whatever we want in terms of marketing, and it is our branding.
H ow do you... You know, in the U.S. we hear companies talk about, you know, certain zip codes, whether it's where they see DMV registrations of electric vehicles. How do you choose - how does Allego choose spots where you think they'll be primely positioned, and what's the competition like?
W e have-
What's the competition like for those spots?
Yeah. A ctually, we were a first mover, so we took good side at the beginning. At the very beginning it was not so good because we didn't have any tools s o it was very, very new s o the first one we installed there were maybe, we guess.
N ow we have developed some very powerful tool in order to forecast the traffic, given the density of registered cars, et cetera, with more than 100 variables. And of course, the more data you have, the more precise it is. T here is competition but, as a matter of fact, with all this, you know, with the kind of business growing, you see one, two, three big players per country, and we are one of them.
The landowners, they want to partner with us because they know that we can go for large programs and that we are here to stay w e have the maintenance capability and the uptime, which is very important because when I look at what's going on in the U.S. with the reliability of the chargers, for instance-
Yeah
... it's very well to install chargers, but it's even better to be sure that they are working properly.
Agree. Yeah.
Okay? Because at the end of the day, otherwise, you are stranded as an EV drivers, and you do not, not like that. That's one, but second, for us, we want to be sure that you can pay and it works. T he uptime is really a key component, and with that, we'll maybe touch upon the technology, but we have developed our own platform w e own EV- everything, and we can develop the features we want in order to secure this high, high time a nd for our landowners, that's very important because they don't want to receive any calls from-
Yeah
... an EV driver having nothing to do with their business. "It doesn't work," "But that's not my station," et cetera, et cetera.
I f I fast-forward, I know that you guys are Europe focused, but if I think about where the U.S. is now and where the U.S. might be going, is it safe to say that in Europe, there's very few upstarts trying to get into this business because you're kind of beyond that stage and it's about scale now, and you have, like, your three or four players in each market, and that's sort of kind of what the market is going to look like, you know, in the next three to five to 10 years, and really it's about driving utilization higher as more vehicles get on the road?
Yeah. O ur challenges are we need to install more chargers because we need to provide the energy. And because AC, as we and home charging, there is a limit in Europe, because what I've just mentioned, we need to develop these public charging stations. That's one.
S econd, when we look at the figures, we have sold last year, 2 million vehicles. In 2035 by year, there will be, if we take the same number of ICE, the 12-13 million vehicles, it need much more and very quicker time, more energy to provide with bigger batteries. Okay? T hat's where, the, that's the challenge is a nd the challenge is, is more physical in term of we need to have the connection, we need to have the planning, the organization, but it's not about the market per se.
Okay. I t's unlikely that there'll be new entrants, but you're still sort of in the growth phase.
Well-
And you still, because of the-
There can be, but we don't see new entrants. During the last year, we don't see any new entrants m aybe in some very local vicinities, but otherwise, no. So-
How do you, how do you position the Allego network versus something like Tesla? And do Tesla drivers charge at the Allego network? Because there's sort of an investor perception in the U.S. that Teslas only charge at Tesla locations, but that's sort of not quite how it ends up working out.
Yeah. T esla, of course, was a very early mover as in the U.S. But they have a lot of chargers, but they have, compared with what they have in the U.S., few sites in Europe. It's around 1,000 sites, if I'm not mistaken. W e have a lot of Tesla drivers on our charging stations, and now they are opening up their stations for non-Tesla in Europe.
Okay.
But the experience you had with Tesla, with the seamless experience, with Plug & Charge, et cetera, it's another cookie to deal with other software OEMs, so that's not the same kind of services.
Okay.
For Tesla.
I s it too early to, of course, sort of see what's going on at the charging stations that Tesla's opened to non-Tesla drivers? Like, what's happening to those stations? Are they... Because that's sort of going to happen in the U.S. with you know, NACS compliance on these OEMs as they can go to Tesla charging stations. Is it, is that a, that's a net benefit for your business, or it's... How do you think about that?
Well, honestly, it has no impact i n the country, the first country they open up, like Netherlands, we haven't seen anything w e have seen our utilization rate growing, so no impact a nd by the way, in Europe, Tesla uses the European standard t here is only one, which is the CCS.
Yeah.
We don't have the discussion about the NACS as in the U.S., so-
Okay. Okay. N o effect on your business as of yet. Trying to think of the way to frame this. You're talking about the EV growth, 2 million cars in last year. Has the amount of chargers in the ground kept up with the amount of EVs on the road? Like, is there, you know, 10 EVs per charger? Has that number been growing, where there's 15 EVs per charger now, and it's harder to get a charging location? Or has the charging infrastructure kept up with the amount of EVs being sold?
We have put more chargers, I think, all the players, but there is more demand than supply. T hat's the reason why, of course, you see a higher utilization rate.
Okay.
But we like it because the more-
Yeah
... the more interesting it is. But there is a limit. There is a limit where we know that, and we monitor that for each station, where when we reach a certain utilization rate, you need to add more chargers, because otherwise people, they don't want to queue, et cetera, and it can be bothers.
Do you have sites where utilization is running 50%, type of thing?
Yeah. For us, we consider that at 30% we need to have more chargers.
Okay.
And is there a way... That 30%, so that's, you know, 24 hours times 30%, that's, you know, is there a way to push demand to off hours? Or, like, what happens, you know, when these chargers are in the middle of the night?
Right.
Or, like, do you, can you play with--do you have pricing leverage or certain things, tools you can do to kind of... Or is utilization going to have a natural ceiling because of time of day?
Well, we can do whatever we want in terms of slope, because we are pricing as we want, again. But that question that pops up all the time, regarding the pricing. I think what is important right now, because we are still in the ramp up, in a way, is to make it simple for our customers.
If you have the price changing all the time, it's a bit weird t hey say, "What's going on here? I don't understand." One. Two, our customer, they understand that if you charge with the slow chargers, well, you're going to pay less compared with the high charger because your time is precious, so you're going to pay for that. That's fine. That's okay. That's understandable. But we are not going to shift people charging during at midnight if they need to charge at six. R eally, the point is that now in Europe, you charge when you need it.
Okay.
Y ou are not going to begin to: "Okay, I need to go there." No, no, no. We have enough charger to make it. A nd most of the people, during night, they sleep, i t's difficult to do it other way. We have other customers, like fleet, for instance, or ride-sharing, who could charge during the night, but that's another kind of business. B2B business, we are discussing with fleets, for instance-
Yeah
... or with commercial vehicles, in order for them to be charged at 6:00 A.M., for instance, for their, for their tour b ut that's, that's another story.
Okay. Can you talk about pricing? We've sort of kind of talked around it a couple times, but what's the right way to think about it, and how do you secure... Is it working with the local utilities, or how do you secure the power for, you know, that you're going to send to the drivers? And how do you think about pricing, and has pricing sort of... You know, how competitive is it, and has it sort of- I don't want to think of it as a commodity or gas, but, like, how, what's the right way to think about margins in the business?
Yeah. F irst of all, coming back to the kind of segmentation I've just mentioned in term o f slow, medium, high, where what we say, it's not really power, but that's, that's a charging station s o you are kind of short one, big, long one, et cetera. W e, that's the kind of marketing where we do around that to disconnect directly from, from, from the power. But regarding the power, we are quite unique. We are our own supplier. W e have an unbundled system in Europe, and we have decided to be our own supplier for chargers.
W e can source with the same kind of energy as the utilities, because that's unbundled and w e have some specific Power Purchase Agreement with renewable power, for instance, assets, wind, solar, during long time, with a very interesting levelized cost of electricity in order to have stable price for our customer t hat's what they like here, because if they buy a car, they can factor the price of energy, and so we can have something stable.
C an you kind of go deeper on that and drill down a little bit? You have power purchase agreements with d oes that help you margin-wise because you're an off-taker?
No, that's-
... and you're filling demand that they want to know that they have? Like, how does that, versus going to a utility and pulling from the grid?
Well, the utility, they can provide, most of the time, short-term contracts, and, if you have a spot, it can vary a lot during, some events i n 2022, we have seen it with crisis or whatever. H ere, our prices are capped because we have a fixed price, non-indexed, by the way. W e know what will be the pricing, we'll be able to charge because of, this specific sourcing. So that's, that's a very important tool for us, to be sure that you are in control of your, one of your main costs, which is the electricity. Yeah.
W hat are the other main costs? Or is it more about depreciation of the...
Yeah, that's about-
building the sites-
Depreciation
... depreciation sites.
The depreciation, that's of course something because we own and that's our CapEx. There is the maintenance cost, and here, in order to make it worthwhile, that's where you need a monitoring very active and platform in order to be sure you have it's working. So IT is very important to be sure that you can act remotely, you can reboot your charging station from a distance without sending somebody. So that's where the quality of the equipment, the quality of the software is very important in order to decrease the cost of operations.
... And below that, you know, can you talk about OpEx? And is OpEx kind of fixed in terms of-
Yeah.
or variable? Like, how does it? So you've got, you're pulling the-
The only variable cost, that would be the electricity-
Yeah
... because linked with the power you deliver, and otherwise then most of the costs are fixed costs.
Okay.
The higher the number of cars coming up and popping up to your station, well, the lower by unit these other OpEx.
Do you have—you talked about 18% utilization in December. Do you have a figure from December 2022, or have you shared kind of how you—the pace of growth in utilization for next year? In December, we were at for our mature comparable at 14.
Okay.
Y ou see that it's growing, and it's growing like a nice slope, as expected with the cars. You know, how do you, how does Allego... If you talk about, you know, multiple competitors in each market, how do you ?incentivize drivers to go to your charging stations versus your peers? Or is that something that you, is that a conversation you have internally, or it's about the cars are on the road, you have the, you've kind of built the network, so you're gonna kind of get your fair share? Like, how do you, is that a way that you think about competition, or it's more about just cars on the road?
Well, actually both. Again, each station we build is assessed with our models in terms of traffic, in terms of taking into account competition and potential competition from other spots. That's quite important, and that's the first output. And then when you begin to have a network, when you are known, when EV drivers know that you are reliable, they come back. That's what we see 8 0% of our customers, they are recurring ones. So they know us, and they come back because they like the service, the way we provide it. W e are marketing at a very low level right now, but it is building up.
How do you think about, you know, chargers you put in the ground three, five years ago? Do you have to go back to those chargers and increase the speed, or are they built in a modular way, whereas cars can take a faster charge and batteries get bigger, how do you kind of solve for that?
R egarding the slow chargers, we don't have to do anything because it was capped, and it is considered, well, normal s o we don't do anything else. And by the way, this kind of station, they cannot be retrofit because you need to redo everything. Most of them are on the pavement, I t's impossible, which is, in a way, a kind of moat, because once you are here, you cannot get out. You just maintain your chargers, but there is nothing else to do. For the ultra-fast chargers, we were one of, well, I think the first one to install in 2017, the first public for any cars ultra-fast charging station in Europe.
T esla had already one, but only for Teslas. What we see that, we have increased, and it was the first chargers, so maybe not so much reliable. We had a few ones w e changed them, and from that moment now, we don't touch anything w hy that? Because we are equipping at 300 kW.
Okay.
Most of the car right now-
Yeah
... we know that, well, it can withstand for the next five to seven years for the average car, so we don't need to do anything else.
Do your customers sort of self-select, like customers that have more time or want to pay less will go to the slower stations, and customers who are in more of a hurry will go to the faster stations? Or is it that each station has older and newer equipment? Like, how does it, how do the stations work out?
W e actually, the first one, we tried to have, you know, the slow chargers for mainly for the cars who are not the old cars, EV cars, which were not able to withstand-
Yeah
... fast or ultra fast, so that one. And we had fast and ultra-fast. W hen the customers has choice, I'd say 90% of the time, he chooses the ultra-fast chargers.
Okay.
Don't ask me why, but that's what we see in the figures, because you could maybe use the fast, so 50 kW, it will be enough, even though it's more expensive to use the ultra-fast. But, yeah, that's how we see it. So that's the reason why now we are in some sites, we just put only ultra-fast, no fast chargers.
C ustomers are opting for speed even though it's more expensive?
Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's what we see right now.
Okay. Okay. And is it, you know, in the U.S., there's been some talk that the drivers of EV tend to be higher income consumers i s it similar in Europe, where those, you know, they can sort of, they can better withstand the cost of higher, faster charging? Or is it that there are lower priced cars, but even those lower priced car consumers still choose faster charging because of convenience?
Yeah, that's what we see.
Okay.
T hey prefer to use ultra-fast because that's more convenient.
Okay.
That's really what we see.
It doesn't break down among, like, Mercedes drivers or BMW drivers or Chinese OEM drivers. It's just they would prefer. What you see on your network is people self-select the faster charger?
Yes.
Okay. Okay. And then how do you... You know, we haven't talked about, you know, manufacturing. Do you, you know, kind of what do you kind of do on your own? What do you outsource, or kind of how do you think about vertical integration?
W e do not manufacture our chargers, to be clear w e use vendors. We have a very strict process w e use very few vendors. We have made the choice not to develop hardware, o nly firmware and the software platform where... That's our IT, the intelligence part... adding and connecting all these chargers.
B y the way, you can see it as well as distributed, electric distributed assets, because we are building well, kind of virtual power station in a way, of 1 MW of consumption or 2 MW of consumption, so it can be quite huge. So we use third party, and we have a process to do that with few vendors in Europe.
Okay.
Only in Europe.
Okay. Y ou know, so kind of what gets you most excited? You know, can you talk about challenges you've had in 2022 and 2023, challenges overcome, and what gets you most excited about 2024 and beyond?
Yeah, sure. I n 2022 and 2023, really the focus was to kickstart the rollout of our only ultra-fast charging stations, so to have the grid connection and all of this. And now we have more than 1,500 sites ready to be rolled out with this kind of equipment. 2 024 will be about rollout, execution and rollout, in order to cope with the growth we see and the demand of ultra-fast charging stations.
Okay. And, is that, will that continue through 2025 and 2026, where it's still sort of-
Yeah
... like, what's the right way to think about it?
We have to cope with the growth. Yes, we had to with the same speed, but it will be high speed, because otherwise we won't be able to charge all these cars b ecause, again, the AC, that's really a bottleneck here. We don't see , if we want to have all these cars charged, we have no choice to, to add more power and ultra-fast power.
H ow should investors sort of think about the story? Is it, you know, it's gonna be, you know, capital intensive growth as you're building out this network, but while you're building out the network, you're seeing utilization go from 14% to 18% to higher, and that's sort of gonna be top down revenue kind of funding the growth? Or like, how do investors think about balance sheet and things like that?
Well, first of all, well, we are, as said, we are, one of the first and maybe the first one to be, adjusted EBITDA, your term in U.S., positive, so we are generating cash flow now.
Okay.
R eally the goal is to have the base big enough in order to generate our own cash flow, to be free cash flow, with the same growth of investment. So that's what we see. T hat's really the targets that we will reach with a very high investment program in between two and three years. And-
That's sort of the right way to think about it, is you guys-
Yeah
... self-funding from this point forward?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay. Okay, so kind of, what is the kind of... You know, if I hear that, that gets me thinking about how the U.S. companies will be at that point in a couple of years. I 'm just kind of curious, you know, what's resonating with investors and kind of what, how do you kind of get them to understand that we're beyond, you guys are beyond that point in the cycle?
Yes.
And- ... you know, what kind of KPIs can you give them? Is it just utilization or is it-
Oh, utilization
... you kind of lay out how many stalls you're gonna build?
I t is utilization rate and of course, the number of gigawatt hour we provide, t o the customers to show the growth b ecause if we have that, it means that we have enough chargers and we can sustain growth.
How do you kind of... You talked, just you said pricing was capped a couple times. I just want to make sure I understand. Does that mean that it's not really a, you know, you, you and your competitors don't really have to compete on price because there's an upper bound that you can charge, in the sense that the driver knows sort of what they'll pay? Or were you talking about the power that you get? I just want to make sure I understand.
No, that's the power we get. That's the power, that's our supply that is capped now because we have organized it like that. The price of the charging stations, it is not capped w e can, we can have the price we want.
The market rates, okay.
Yes. I t's really, yeah, what the customer is ready to pay.
Okay. Okay, well, that's great, I really appreciate your time this morning i definitely learned a lot about charging in Europe, which is something that I, I think just if I was to think about takeaways, it's that DC charging is sort of how Europe has grown up, and that's sort of what customers are preferencing. And for you guys, it's about getting as many chargers in the ground while still seeing utilization grow, so you can be, you know, cash flow positive i s that the right way to think about it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay. Well,
Thanks for-
... appreciate you this morning. Have a great weekend.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Thank you for the time, Chris.