Samuel Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Guidehouse Insights, an infrastructure consulting firm, agrees with that assessment. “There is certainly a large, addressable market for these types of services,” he said. “This whole area is something that will be critical as all these automakers have huge plans to build and hopefully sell millions of EVs over the next five to 10 years.”
While many current EV owners are generally wealthy and can manage to do most of their charging off the street and overnight in their own garages with slower Level 2 chargers, Mr Abuelsamid noted: “The vast majority of Americans never buy a new vehicle in their lifetime—about three and a half times as many used vehicles are sold as new each year.”
“As you grow the EV market, more and more are entering the used vehicle market,” he continued. “Many of these customers will not be able to charge at home. They need public charging infrastructure. So you have to develop that. And companies like Charge will be important – helping you figure out where to find chargers, especially for DC fast charging, where you need quite a bit of electrical capacity to get to the site.”
Ensuring regulatory approvals and reliable local contractors is also necessary, he said.
The decision to piggyback on Charge’s mobile communications business was a critical step, said Mr. Fox, 49.
“Charging electric cars is a separate infrastructure, but we didn’t want to waste a ton of investor dollars building this business,” he said. “And so we acquired companies that provided telecommunications infrastructure services, because it might not be the exact same employee, but it’s the same kind of job, pulling cables.”
Charge reports $357 million in revenue in the first three quarters of 2021 and now trades over-the-counter (as CRGE), but is being upgraded to Nasdaq. In January, Charge also added EV Group Holdings, which focuses on real estate for commercial fleet operators in need of charging depots, to its portfolio.
Like Mr. LaNeve, who grew up the son and grandson of steelworkers in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, Mr. Fox, who grew up in Queens, says the working-class roots—his father was a union electrician—for his approach to business.
