Episode Transcript
Marguerite: Hello, I'm Marguerite Harrington, Director of Strategy and Innovation at London Stock Exchange Group. I'm delighted to be here today for our next episode of the Be Inspired CEO series. Joining me today is Erik Fairbairn, CEO of Pod Point, one of the UK's leading electric vehicle charging companies. Last year, Pod Point's technology enabled almost 1 billion kilometers of electric driving across the UK. So first of all, congratulations Eric, those are mpressive numbers. So what's your vision of what's possible with that market? How many charging phones are we going to see and are we going to see more individuals charging at home?
Erik: Well, good afternoon to start with, but yeah, thank you for the question. So I think if we start with our vision, our vision of the business is to make travel that doesn't damage the earth. And specifically that's by putting a Pod Point everywhere you park. So we really believe in putting charging infrastructure everywhere people leave their cars and in fact, the sort of circa 6,000 charging points you mentioned is just our public network. If we include our workplace and our home network, we're about 137,000 charging points across the UK. So already beginning to get to some interesting scale. But I think also, although Pod Point's been around for 13 years, actually only 1% of cars on the road today are electric. So that means we've got 99% still to go. So I really think of Pod Point really in its infancy. Everything is ahead of us and it really looks like the public is starting to adopt electric vehicles and roughly we think you need about one charging point per electric car. So if in the UK we've got between 25 and 30 million cars, that's the sort of number of charging points we're going to need. By the time everybody gets the driving electric vehicle in, I hope by the time we get to 2040.
Marguerite: That's really exciting. Your strategy today seems to focus very much on growth within the UK. Is that deliberate? You have ambition to go global?
Erik: So travel not damaging the Earth of course, is much bigger than the UK. But what we think is we can have the most impact as a business if we really focus our resources in just one place. So we are all about making the electric vehicle charging network work within the UK. I think if we look to the long term, then of course we're not against expanding that out. Our mission has the rest of the Earth in it. But for today it's very much a focus on the UK and really making sure that we've got the charging infrastructure the people of the UK need.
Marguerite: And who are your customers today in the uk? Is it mainly a B2B business, uh, or are you also increasingly selling to individuals?
Erik: It's very much a mix. So, as part of our putting a Pod Point everywhere you park, we split that into four segments. So Pod Point does home charging, it does workplace charging, it does destination or public charging, and it does on route charging. And they're very different customers. Home charge is predominantly a B2C activity so we're selling a charging point to a private individual to enable them to charge their car at home. Obviously something like workplace, we tend to be working with the bigger corporates and for example, maybe the last mile delivery firm. So we're putting in charging infrastructure for their staff or their visitors or maybe even for their fleets of cars. Destination then is all about charging where people happen to go. So we really think you should charge your vehicle while you are busy doing something else. So your gym chain, your supermarket, you know, the National Trust, anywhere that you go, we're putting charging infrastructure in there, more of a B2B relationship, but a different group. And finally on route is about putting charging places on the way to places. So that's really working with locations that people go on route to places. So supermarkets being a great example of where we've got a lot of our on route charging capability.
Marguerite: Earlier you mentioned that only 1% of the cars today on the roads in the UK are electric vehicles and that is quite shocking. So is the government doing enough? What do you think of the current incentives that the UK government has put in place to speed up that transition to electric vehicles?
Erik: I think it's worth putting a little bit of perspective on the 1%. So what we've got in the UK is between 25 and 30 million cars and in the UK we buy about 2 million cars each year. So what that means is, even though about somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of all new vehicle sales at the moment are fully electric, that's pretty good in terms of percentage of new car sales, it still takes a long time to convert all the cars in the UK. So although we're only at 1%, it really feels like we're into the phase of the market where it's really accelerating quickly. And over the next 10 or 15 years, you'll really see electric vehicles being the main way that we all drive around. Now, in terms of the, government incentive, I'm actually pretty supportive of the government. Obviously I've been running Pod Point for 13 years or so, and across that time I think the government has had a reasonably intelligent strategy of helping the electric vehicle market, be it the charging infrastructure to all the cars, but also beginning to wind down the incentives as it gets more popular.
Now that we're at one in four, or one in five cars are battery electric, of course the government is beginning to wind back the incentives and that makes sense. We're also seeing things like going from direct fiscal incentives. So we used to have an amount of a home charge point or an amount of an electric car provided by the government moving to things like making sure planning includes a requirement for electric vehicle charging. So that's taking the cost of that off the public person, off the treasury and spreading that cost around the rest of the industry. And to me that's sensible as it scales. So I'm pretty positive for what the UK's done and I would say, you know, if you really want to look at the market, which is furthest ahead, Norway is the answer. But that's almost the outlier. If you look at the sort of larger countries that are in Europe that are really making electrification happen, I think the UK stands up as one of the best examples.
Maguerite: The story of Pod Point today is a real success story and it's great to see such innovation coming from the UK and leading the way but I'm sure that didn't come without any challenges. So, what have been your biggest challenges in terms of growing the company further, and what have you done to overcome them?
Erik: Of course, over 13 years there's been all sorts of challenges and I sometimes say, at the beginning, I think in the year that we started Pod Point there were maybe 56 electric vehicles somewhere in the UK, it was really before electric vehicles had started. We started a company in 2009 attempting to sell charging infrastructure, a thing that didn't exist. So you can probably imagine that was an extremely difficult sell to persuade anyone they wanted a charging point. In terms of Pod Point's history, it took a long time for the business really to get going. But what we did in that period was we sort of learned our craft. We learned how to make the right product, the right technology, the in-store capability, all of the sort of corporate capability we needed until we got into, in reality in the last five years, electric vehicles have really started to accelerate, we'd already learned how to do all of this stuff. We'd already thought it through, we'd built all the capabilities we needed, and it was simply a case of scaling up those capabilities. I guess I say simply, but with a business we were about 86% growth last year. There's not much simple about growing at 86%. And you have to remember, we're not a pure software play. We've got a hardware element to the business as well and an install element to the business. So growing all of that lot at 86% has been a wonderful challenge. I've enjoyed every moment of it, but it's certainly kept us quite busy making sure that we can do that.
Marguerite: So what's next for platforms?
Erik: Well, I think that we continue on our mission really. So the first thing is we've got to build lots more charging infrastructure. We've got to make sure that we are scaling, proportionate to electric vehicles arriving. So the first challenge is just what I call build at scale. We've just got to continue scaling up every element of what we do. And the other thing is that, what you find as a market matures is you get more sub routes to market. So if I talk to you about homework destination on route as the four bits we put charging infrastructure in, for example, home charge, well, I'm only really talking to you about people who park their cars off streets. Next we need to deal with people who lives in blocks of flats, then we need to deal with people who park their cars on street, on the streets of London, for example.
So there's an awful lot of additional complexity to go. And finally, the long-term plan of Pod Point, once we've built all of the charging infrastructure, we are effectively a smart energy play. What we want to do is manage the nation's electricity flowing into electric cars and we expect more and more of the electricity generation to be renewable. And as we all know, renewable solar wind tends to be not always generating. So if we can control exactly when energy flows into the nation's electric vehicles, we can match that really well with renewable generations. So we should have more solar, more wind as a result of Pod Point controlling how energy flows into the nation's cars.
Marguerite: Well Eric, thanks so much for your time and for sharing your story and your insights, and we look forward to hearing more of that in the coming years as we continue to see your company grow.
Erik: Thank very much.
