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A leading UK electric-vehicle charging company that floated in London in 2021 at a £350mn valuation has agreed to a buyout by EDF for just over £10mn.
Pod Point, which sells the hardware to charge EVs, blamed stiff competition and a slower than expected adoption of EVs for its problems. It suspended its shares in May after a tumultuous start to the year in which it issued a profit warning and discovered £4.4mn of bad debts on its books.
A takeover would mark the latest delisting of a London-listed group. Last week, UK fintech Wise announced plans to move its primary listing to the US, following plumbing group Ferguson and building materials company CRH.
This week a US private equity consortium agreed a £1.7bn deal for NHS landlord Assura, and private equity group Advent International said it was in talks to buy industrial group Spectris in a £4.4bn deal.
Pod Point is trying to pivot its business from selling charging hardware to offering EV charging as a subscription service.
EDF, Pod Point’s biggest shareholder, said the company was a well established brand with a broad customer base and that it supported the new strategy.
But the French state utility added that Pod Point had been “consistently cash flow negative throughout its history” and reliant on EDF, which holds a 53 per cent stake in the company, for “grant funding and financial support . . . to execute its business strategy to date”.
It said that an independent Pod Point would require “substantial” new financing to avoid a liquidity crunch, “which would be highly challenging to obtain, given current market conditions”.
Pod Point said in June that it was “minded” to accept EDF’s offer of 6.5p-a-share — a far cry from its IPO price of 225p-a-share — because it needed a significant injection of new capital.
Pod Point’s share price fell nearly 40 per cent in January, when it issued a profit warning for last year because of the “challenging” UK market. Shares fell a further 25 per cent in mid-April when it said an audit had discovered bad debts from 2020 to 2024, which it did not expect to recover.
Pod Point on Thursday reported a loss before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation last year of £20.7mn, compared with analysts’ expectations of a loss of £14mn. Pod Point said the £5.2mn of cash it had on its books at the end of last year was unaffected.
The UK government has launched a consultation on its targets for EV sales after complaints from carmakers that they were unable to meet a quota for 80 per cent of their sales to be zero-emission by the end of the decade. Last year, EVs accounted for 22 per cent of vehicles sold.
