Matthias SpeicherIn short
Growth is not a strategy. It is a bet. Two paths are viable, differentiation or low cost, and in the charging market no real low-cost path currently exists. Charging is not a commodity, it is an infrastructural service. Growth is an obligation towards those who signal, through return visits, that capacity is missing. And in a mature market, innovation is often subtraction.
In the first four parts I described how trust forms from the user’s perspective, why it is the only source of stable utilisation, and what mature markets do differently from immature ones. This final part is about the strategic consequence. What does all of this mean for the decisions charging operators are making today?
The wrong question
In charging infrastructure, one simple logic dominates. More sites, more chargers, more coverage. Growth as the answer to everything.
That is not a strategy. It is a bet.
My strategic thinking follows Roger Martin closely. Strategy is not a plan, not a forecast, not a growth target. Strategy is a structured theory of how value is created under uncertainty. And within that theory, I see only two genuinely viable paths: differentiation or low cost.
In the charging market, there is currently no real low-cost path. Low cost would require radical standardisation, minimal services, extreme utilisation and uncompromising cost discipline. There is no RyanCharge.
Instead, most operators try to be simultaneously a bit cheaper, a bit better, a bit more modern and a bit more convenient. The result is strategic blur. Everyone looks similar, offers similar things, has similar prices, and nobody is clearly defensible. In that state, price becomes a substitute for strategy. Price wars become a consumption of substance.
Charging is not a commodity
A central error I hear regularly: electricity is a commodity, so price decides.
That is half right. Electricity is a commodity. Charging is not.
Nobody buys electricity to shovel it into a car. What is traded is accessibility, availability, reliability, system integration, predictability. Charging is an infrastructural service. And the strongest evidence for that lies in one simple observation. If charging were a commodity, every operator would maximise margin. The fact that everyone talks about utilisation instead reveals the actual system logic.
Even in classical commodity markets, price never decides alone. Gas is not evaluated only by molecules, but by origin, security, supply stability. Cobalt not only by purity, but by ethics and supply chain risk. Wherever supply becomes critical, differentiation features emerge that can be monetised. In charging, some of them are already visible. Guaranteed session start, no failed sessions, price consistency, system availability under load. Others still need to be worked out.
Growth as obligation, not as right
Growth is not a competitive advantage. Not protection. Not a goal.
Growth is an obligation that arises toward concrete stakeholders. Toward users who signal through return visits that capacity is missing. Toward partners who need system stability. Toward investors who require sustainable cash flows.
The actual strategic question is not: how do we grow faster? It is: where are we allowed to grow without destroying trust?
Because every new site multiplies quality variance, incident response load, system complexity and friction probability. Growth without system maturity is not progress. It is an accelerant for instability.
An operator with few sites and high return rates is economically stronger than an operator with nationwide presence and an empty network. That sounds simple. It still contradicts what many operators are doing right now.
The tipping point
The market is structurally reaching a point where the previous growth logic breaks.
Fixed costs remain even as prices fall. Users no longer compare only tariffs, but systems. Capital no longer asks about charger counts, but about utilisation quality. The central question investors will ask is: can we build trust faster than our fixed costs rise?
How serious that question is shows up in the annual reports. EnBW reports a return on capital employed of 4.2 percent in 2023 and 6.3 percent in 2024 for its Smart Infrastructure for Customers segment, which houses the charging business. The group as a whole sits at 10.6 percent. EnBW’s weighted average cost of capital is estimated externally at around 5.7 percent.
Which means: in 2023 the return sat below the cost of capital and the segment destroyed value. In 2024 it sits just above. The segment covers its financing costs for the first time and generates no free cash flow. For comparison, its contribution to group EBITDA is around 6.6 percent, while two other segments together account for over 99 percent.
That is not an accusation. It is the situation. A charging business that barely covers its cost of capital does not grow out of itself. Every new charging park gets financed from other divisions, from equity partners, or from public funding. And this is the starting position of one of the strongest operators in the market, backed by grids and generation. A pure CPO has no such buffer.
Two caveats. The segment covers more than the charging business, and the report does not allow a clean attribution of capital employed. And this is my own reading of publicly available annual reports, without internal information and without any judgement of the company’s decisions. It may be wrong.
Whoever cannot answer the question about trust and fixed costs will not fail because they are too small, but because they became too broad, too fragmented and too unclear.
The only defensible choice
In this market phase, exactly one lever remains that simultaneously stabilises utilisation, increases volume, reduces fixed costs, defuses price wars and secures investment capacity: trust as a system property.
Not as image. Not as marketing. Not as a promise. But as operational reality. The session starts. Failed sessions stay the exception. Performance matches expectation. The price is consistent. The site is predictable.
Not perfect systems win. Predictable ones.
In a mature market, innovation is often subtraction. Leaving things out is harder than adding them, because it challenges existing assumptions, dissolves internal logic and forgoes visible self-confirmation. Making things normal is the most demanding form of innovation this market has to offer.
Bridge to the final part
The market will sort itself out over the coming years. Not by size, not by capital, not by speed. But by one single question that users answer implicitly every day:
Who deserves to have me come back?
Charging infrastructure does not scale through technology, not through price, not through expansion. It scales through trust. That is not an opinion. It is systems logic.
Which leaves one question open, and it is the most uncomfortable in the whole series. If trust is the lever and utilisation only the result, how does an operator see that trust is eroding before utilisation gives him the answer? That is what the final part is about.