Fastned B.V. (FAST.AS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to today's Fastned Q4 2024 Trading Update Call. And now I'd like to hand the call over to Michiel Langezaal, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator, and I'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone on this call as well as to those joining via our webcast. You can find a copy of the presentation used during this call on our Investor Relations website found at ir.fastnedcharging.com. And just for starters, I would like to invite you to take a look at the picture you see on this first slide. It's a drone shot of our largest station in France, situated right alongside the highway at Aire de Saulce, one of the key vacation routes in France. It's a great representation of how we're moving Fastned forward: big stations with large number of top-quality chargers in high-traffic locations. Aire de Saulce is among the many new stations we've opened during this fourth quarter, and I'll give you more details about it later. Moving to Slide 2. With reference to the information provided in these slides and discussed during this call, please take note of the disclaimer. Slide 3, please. My name is Michiel Langezaal. I'm the CEO and one of the founders of Fastned. Victor Van Dijk, our CFO, is with me on this call. Together, we will present this webcast. Today, I will take you through the highlights of the final quarter of 2024. We'll present our latest results, update you on our plans for 2025, give you insight in how we see market conditions changing and what our view is on today's sentiment. Today, we'll also focus on how we've ramped up the acquisition pace of new locations and how, in parallel, we are increasing the rate of station construction. After that, we will take a look at the guidance we presented on Charging Day in June 2022 and how we are tracking on the pathway towards these targets. At this point, Victor will take over and talk you through the top line results for the fourth quarter. And as always, we will update you on our station metrics. We will also be updating our guidance for 2025, as you may have seen in our press release this morning. And together, we'll take you through our rationale. After our presentation, we'll be happy to answer your questions. [Operator Instructions] We've scheduled this call to last for 1 hour. So let's get started. Slide 4. The main message we see is that Fastned is continuing its growth. A standout metric for us is energy delivered, which in Q4 reached over 40 gigawatt hours, a year-on-year increase of 33%. This is a logical result of our scaling as EV stock increases, leading to higher sales at existing stations while we additionally continue to construct and open more stations. This, in turn, drives gross profit, up 45% in comparison to last year at EUR 20.6 million. This developing commercial performance is also contributing to a strong cash position, which amounts to over EUR 117 million at the end of the quarter. We expect these funds to cover our entire 2025 rollout by good margin. These results point out the importance of a great concept and business case to realize profitable growth at what is still a very early stage in the market while at the same time targeting serious scale. Expanding the network. In terms of infrastructure, I'm delighted to say we opened 20 new stations in Q4, bringing us to a total of 346 stations, right in line with the top end of our guidance for 2024. Note that while expanding our network and entering new countries, we, in parallel, have been scaling our operations. And in this context, I think we can be very proud to continue to deliver the same or even higher reliability to our customers, that reliability that Fastned is known for and preferred for. The speed of location acquisition has more than doubled in 2024, going from 50 to 60 locations per year to vastly above 100. That is really a step change. There's hardly any charging player in Europe acquiring these high-traffic locations at such pace. And in my view, these are the activities and results that will define long-term success, building a large portfolio of high-traffic locations. There will be more to say about this later, but it's worth noting that we're now at 569 secured locations around Europe, more than halfway to our target of 1,000 locations by 2030. And a word on the final bullet here, energy delivered per station. This rose to 504 megawatt hour annualized in Q4 2024, up 14% year-on-year and below BEV fleet penetration growth of 28%. Here, we see the effect of the slower-than-expected EV sales during 2024. We should note that the charging industry takes a long-term outlook, and whether we build stations today or next year makes little difference in terms of NPV or IRR. It is a 10-year out hockey stick that defines the result. So the infrastructure rollout just moves according to its 10-year plan, adding charging supply to the market. For example, in the Netherlands, the total added DC capacity is around 40% according to our analysis, outpacing EV stock growth. This includes our big charging stations that deliver a great business case. But it also includes the large number of low-quality single chargers added to a parking bay at the supermarket or at the back of the petrol station. It all adds to the charging supply. At the same time, charging demand did not grow in line with that development last year. Consumers decided to delay purchases in 2024 and wait for the already announced newer, better and more affordable models coming in 2025. The car industry had good reasons to postpone the into their models and scaling of production in light of the changeover to the 2025 EU CO2 regulations. So we've built capacity, which puts us slightly ahead of the market, capacity that will quickly come into use as the market starts accelerating again. In summary, these figures show significant year-on-year growth across the board from stations to revenue to profitability even during a year when market sentiment on EVs seems to lean to the negative. And it's worth taking a look at the facts behind that sentiment. Slide 5. It wasn't hard to find negative stories about the EV market in the press last year. It seemed a very different environment from that of, let's say, 2020 to 2022 with Tesla delivering on its promise of a mid-market long-range electric vehicle being produced at scale, and the rest of the car industry embracing the need for change and introducing their transition plans and own fully electric skateboard platforms. Last year's sentiment was the toning down of this for many reasons. There's a selection of headlines on the left of this slide. And it's true that EV sales in 2024 have shown a mild slowdown and are lower than some analysts expected years ago. That said, no startup can expect to develop in a straight line towards its goal nor can we in the scaling phase of the market. But the strength of negativity isn't matched by the numbers we see across the market. On the right of the slide, we see that EV sales continued to grow in almost all of our key markets, this despite all the doom and gloom we read about in the media. We do see a reduction in Germany, which is caused by the abrupt cancellation of government subsidies for EVs. And moreover, we feel that the PR engines from some OEMs have been running overtime to sell the negative story on EVs to the media in order to support the negotiations with unions and the interplay of CO2 regulation and EV incentives in the country. So in sum, we recognize shifting sentiment and are keen to look for the triggers and drivers that will shift it back again. This brings me to the next slide. Sentiments can be bullish or bearish, but we do see one absolute truth: consistent long-term growth in the EV market. And history shows us that as EV penetration in our markets increases, so does the number of visitors to our charging stations. We are here for the long haul, and that stands in our favor. The long-term outlook for EV growth is extremely strong and has only been improving, giving us every reason to be optimistic for what's next. And the chart here shows how we expect EV fleets in our target markets to grow in the next 5 years. With an anticipated compound annual growth rate of over 30%, we estimate a massive fivefold increase in the number of electric cars on the roads in the next 6 years. This growth is supported, and in some cases, enabled by governments at all levels from local to international. Subsidies may come and go, but the underlying support for EVs and the infrastructure they require is unshakable. Despite the negativity there is, an ever-more converging market outlook on EVs is clear: they are here and more are coming every day. They will all need places to fast-charge and only the infrastructure that has a business case will be maintained and ready to serve these cars. This year, we expect to see cheaper models of EVs being made available to consumers, providing a kickstart for another acceleration of sales and bringing electric mobility to a whole new group of potential buyers. To capture this growth, we need stations, and to build stations, we need locations, which brings me to Slide 7. Last quarter, we continued on our path of expanding our network at a much higher pace and still growing pace. In 2024, we signed 138 new locations to be added to our network, more than double that of previous years. I'm extremely proud of how we have scaled up our rate of acquisition. And again, there are very few players in the charging market acquiring such locations at this high pace and I think this is what investors should be looking at. This increase in pace is the consequence of 3 interconnected things. The first is a great charging concept. Large, visible charging stations on high-traffic locations supported through tech operations and our own in-house developed back ends to deliver the highest success rate in the industry and the best charging experience there is. This concept delivers an outstanding business case. Fastned has, after Tesla, the highest charging stations per location in the industry. And secondly, in tenders, where our concept is evaluated against others, the quality of service and success rate often earn us high scores. Moreover, the industry-leading business case allows us to bid leading rents where needed. And finally, the other fishing pool for locations is strategically located sites along high-traffic roads, lands for which we compete with the likes of Burger King, Costa Coffee or the logistical centers of Amazon or DHL. An outstanding business case and high sales per location now allow Fastned to pay market rents and to tap into this private market at scale. And because we have, over the last 2 years invested heavily in scaling our network expansion team, we are now capable on delivering on this opportunity. And that is what we see back in the numbers. With adding 138 locations in 2024 and being on a solid growth trajectory, we are well on our way towards 1,000 stations in 2030. With having so many new locations, logically we're keen on getting them constructed. Moving on to Slide 8. This is why I'm incredibly proud of having built 20 charging stations last quarter and delivering charging stations like this to the market, Aire de Saulce, our biggest charging station in France with 17 positions delivering up to 300 kilowatts each. This station caters to the typical long-distance traffic, Autoroute du Soleil from the south of France back up north, a motorway that in busy periods sees 180,000 cars each day. Soon, 10% of the cars on this road will be electric and these motorways have service areas positioned roughly every 50 kilometers or so. So we needed a station with many chargers to cater to hundreds of people per day. Note also the size of the petrol station at the top right, this is also completely newly built, yet it only has 5 pumps, the previous one had 10. This shows the transition from fossil fuels to electric on the move. And secondly, it shows that on the motorways, the need for charging is so significant that we need charging stations that are at least the size of the existing petrol stations, if not much bigger. For those wondering about the competitiveness of petrol stations replacing pump for a charger, that simply is not a competitive offer from many aspects and key amongst them being capacity, what we just talked about, and visibility. Moving on to Slide 9. Earlier in this presentation, I mentioned us tapping into the market of strategic locations along high-traffic roads and competing for such land with anyone from logistic companies to McDonald's. This source of locations is very interesting as it allows us to contract long term, think 20 or 30 years, and develop something sizable. Only with nothing else around, the common questions are: where do I go to the toilet and how do I get coffee? The presence of amenities is very important to delivering a great charging experience. Last year, we launched our first on-motorway shop in Belgium on the route from Antwerp to Rotterdam on the A16. This is a full-scale manned shop. This quarter, we have launched unmanned shops on 2 off-motorway locations, one in Belgium and the other in Germany. Moving on to Slide 10, showing you the second shop in Germany. Not all locations we built are on motorway, as an example, think about the future high-traffic inner city locations in London. These off-motorway locations do not have the same ability to tap directly into the markets of both petrol and electric drivers stopping for coffee and snacks as those locations on the motorway. Or in other words, we don't expect many petrol drivers to go to a charging station shop, which is located in a city while on a motorway given the scarce nature of shops we can. And this makes the development of unmanned shops catering for lower visitor numbers on a shop level very important to scaling our expansion of high traffic off-motorway locations while offering a great charging experience to electric drivers. Plus, on the operations side, an unmanned concept is more scalable and makes you less dependent on personnel, something that supermarkets with their self-scan cash registers have found out as well. In short, another important ingredient to Fastned scaling a great charging experience and concept into Europe at speed. And this brings me to Charging Day and guidance, moving to Slide 11. Here, I will soon hand you over to Victor for the financial details and his analysis. But I would like to provide you my high-level take on it as well, which is the following: some years ago, Fastned was a prominent Dutch fast-charging player and we saw the opportunity to grow the company into a leading European charging network, and in doing so, take the next step in our mission and support the acceleration of electric mobility across Europe. When setting our objectives that we communicated at Charging Day, we largely had the 2021 full year numbers and those of Q1 2022. Fastned was a network of just under 200 charging stations with close to 1,000 chargers and an average station did EUR 119,000 in revenue annualized. With the massive scaling of the market, which was expected, we set ourselves the goal of more than doubling the network in 3 years and more than threefold-ing revenues in the same period on a station level. A network expansion trajectory we have been trailing nicely, but not by a big margin. Bottlenecks such as grid congestion and permits have slowed us down more than we planned for, and with market sentiments being negative, we feel it is important to be prudent on the growth that we can realize this year. And on that note, I would like to hand you over to Victor Van Dijk, our CFO. Go ahead, Victor.

Yes. Thanks, Michiel, and welcome also from my side. I would indeed like to take a step back and look at what we accomplished since our last Capital Markets Day called Charging Day that we held in June 2022, 2.5 years ago. Overall, we set the goal to become a European leader in fast charging. We achieved that by continuing our market-leading customer experience demonstrated by being named Best Fast Charging Network in countries like the U.K., France, Belgium and the Netherlands multiple times since then. We also demonstrate being a European leader by being a top 3 player in terms of overall kilowatt-hour sales in Western Europe. At Charging Day, we set very ambitious goals for network expansion, revenue and profitability for the medium and long term, as you can see on this slide. Notably, we achieved underlying EBITDA -- our underlying EBITDA positive growth 6 months early in the first half of 2023, likely being one of the first and still few charging companies being EBITDA positive. I'll talk about the other goals on the next slide. As you could see on the previous slides, with sixfold-ed revenues since 2021 and tenfold revenues since 2020, so in 4 years' time. If you look at Q4 run rate revenues, we are above EUR 100 million annualized revenues by now. As important is that we doubled profitability in the same period, looking at operational EBITDA margin. I think we can be extremely proud of this. I find it hard to think of a company that tenfold-ed revenues and doubled profitability over a similar period. So how did we do it? By focusing on high-traffic locations in the market, really the top 10%, and we want to have 1,000 of those by 2030 and by creating the best concept in the market and focusing on the customer experience. Both of them are hard to do, but we have become good at it. This combination will give you outsized revenue growth. As you can see, with 3.5-fold our revenues per station. As said, we doubled our profitability. That is quite a feat knowing that we more than tripled the number of employees since 2021. We set very ambitious targets during Charging Day. Looking back, I think it was quite courageous to set targets like this. We met the main one becoming a European leader and we met some early like becoming EBITDA positive. However, we won't meet all of them, as you have seen in our updates of 2025 guidance items. I don't like looking at excuses for that, but I think it's good to note a few of the challenges we've had to deal with in this period. And these are an inflation surge like we have not seen in 40 years, an energy crisis like we have not seen in 50 years, somewhat slower-than-expected take-up of electric vehicles and delays in tenders coming to the market, a rapidly shifting political landscape. So we're proud that in this context, we tenfold-ed revenues in the last 4 years while doubling profitability and breaking the EUR 100 million annualized revenues. With a much higher speed of location acquisition and a higher pace of construction on the horizon, we think we can tenfold revenues again in the next 6 years while keeping profitability at a similar level. Looking at the current share price, we think that, that growth part provides for a massive opportunity for investors. Next slide, please. Just a quick check that we are developing favorably against others, and we do. You see the sessions per station per day here over the last 3 years. So basically, revenues are sales per station. You see the development for the top 10 fast-charging companies in our region on this slide. This excludes Tesla as we don't have that data, and Tesla will have higher sales per station as they draw part of the Tesla drivers through navigation and Tesla drivers slow charge less and fast charge instead. We performed on top of the market versus others in terms of sales per station, and we think that's an incredibly important differentiator. We think that having high sales per location demonstrates we're providing the most value to the driver, and therefore, the most value to the transition. It also provides most value to landlords who want to attract customers through their locations. It also provides for the best business case, so most value to the investors. This is really the synergy we try to achieve. Station economics on the next slide, continue to track in line with expectations with annualized revenues of EUR 315,000 per station and EUR 268,000 for the whole year of 2024. EV fleet is expected to double in the next 2 to 3 years. and more than double again towards 2030, as you saw on Slide 6. With this, we feel we are on track to reach the EUR 1 million revenue per station. Operational EBITDA margin is on the right track, as I explained before. Utilization was at 14.9%, the highest ever. That is over 2x the utilization of other fast-charging companies active in our markets, similar to what you saw on the previous slides. So it's important to note that very few CPOs have station metrics like this, giving us a lot of protection from the competition. Note that we do not optimize for high utilization yet. For reference, if we would not have added more chargers per station in the last year, utilization would have been 16.8%. If we would not have added chargers in the last 2 years, our utilization would already have been above 20%. In that sense, you can see that we, to some extent, control utilization by optimizing the number of chargers. These field fleets will double in the next 2 to 3 years, which will increase demand, and we're adding capacity to cater for the demand growth already. So the station economics are tracking very, very well. Next slide, please. Following all this and with more visibility on the BEV market to support regimes, the development of our network expansion and our budget calculations, we updated our guidance for 2025. We are increasing our number of employees as we see the opportunity to continue to acquire deals and operate stations that have shown to accelerate the transition, provide real value to our customers that provides for a market-leading business case. We do see that after the step change in our location acquisition from 50 to 60 per year to 138 last year, our construction pace takes a bit longer to follow that step change. To give you some insights, we submitted 50 building permits in 2023 and ramped that up to 80 building permits in 2024, which defines the build pace in 2025. We have full confidence that we, again, ramp -- that we can again ramp up the building permit submission this year, setting the stage for the 2026 build pace. As such, we expect to have 400 to 425 stations operational by the end of this year. With BEV adoption slower than expected at Charging Day or even at the start of last year, we lowered our revenue per station forecast for 2025 to more than EUR 325,000 per station average over 2025, which we think is prudent. With a lower revenue per station, with us increasing our staff and with an increase in grid fees, we also lowered our operational EBITDA margin expectation for this year to 35% to 40%. Overall, we see a massive opportunity in these markets, potentially tenfold-ing our sales again in the rest of the decade, accelerating transition and doing it in a profitable way. And we hope our investors see this opportunity as well.

Thanks for talking us through the financials, Victor, and particularly for outlining in such detail how we came to this guidance update. I agree it's good to be prudent given the current sentiment on the market. Moreover, Victor has shown how important every element of our company is in making that step change to an ever larger -- to an even larger charging network while at the same time keeping and improving reliability and this is -- while I'm also very pleased that Francoise has joined us as COO and is helping us in accelerating while scaling the organization. And this gives me a lot of confidence that we will deliver on that path towards 1,000 stations. And on that note, I would like to thank you all for listening. And I'll now hand the word back to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question is from Robert Vink from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Yes. My first question is about your station guidance for the year and 2025. Could you maybe elaborate a bit more on the bandwidth, how safe is kind of the lower part of the bandwidth? What are the assumptions for that, and yes, what are the assumptions for the higher end of the bandwidth. Maybe a second question about technology. Yes, what are you kind of working on internally in terms of back end and front end? Where are your resources focused? And what results have you seen from, yes, technology, launch of new software or software updates?

Thanks, Robert. Maybe on the bandwidth, I think -- let's say, I think, as Victor explained that, sort of a key input is having that location developed. So all the prerequisites in place, those building permits. That is, I think, a very important element. Another element is, of course, bringing power to the site. So let's say, the 80 building permits handed in last year, that gives us a lot of confidence to deliver in this target range. But there are risks and that basically is why we put a range to that target because basically you would expect to be able to build all those locations with those building permits, but on the other hand, we've also seen over the last years congestion in grids becoming more and more of a thing. And that is something that we basically think we need to account for. And I think that is prudent in that sense. And then maybe on tech focus, I think maybe -- I think it's good to say there that the far majority of the tech that we develop relates to, you could call, tech operations. Basically, the underlying protocols, reliability, enabling all -- the entire ecosystem to use their payment methods that they want, to exchange the information that's needed, to make the, let's say, real-life data of chargers available, for example, to other apps. So I think it's very difficult in that sense to sort of pinpoint one thing, but I think when you look at it as a whole, let's say, 3 or 4 years ago, you could see maybe live data and only our app and now you can see that in practically all apps.

Maybe to add to that on the tech side, I think it's very important to realize that most of the other CPOs that you've seen in our presentation have a third-party software stack and we have always thought it's really key to have our own software that leads to the reliability scores that we were able to realize and that leads to the customer experience. And if you rely on third parties very -- it makes you not flexible enough and also the cost, as we understand, are going up on that side. I think one of the elements to mention this year, I think, is also the commercial element. So it allows you also to offer -- to give different offerings to customers, differentiate, for instance, on pricing between ours and those kind of optimizations were only really starting, but that's something where we can really also benefit from having our own tech stack, our own development team and use it to iterate, yes, the commercial propositions.

We will now move to our next question from David Kerstens from Jefferies.

I have a question on the market and the data that you provide on Slide 6. So in 2024, the new EV registrations, they were stable at 1.5 million. I think, in order to continue to grow the fleet by more than 30%, the data imply that you expect 2.2 million new EVs in 2025. that's up 47% after a stable number in 2024. So what are you seeing now in the market that is driving that big pickup in growth of new EVs? So you talked about the Osborne effect already last year. Are those new models now available? And will that lead to this acceleration in growth?

Yes, let me at least start to take that, David. A large part of that is due to the CO2 regulation. There's step-up in regulation that OEMs will need to meet in terms of their sales. We saw a similar step-up in 2019, 2020 when -- and that made it at that stage sales penetration went from about 2% to 3% to about 10%, 12%. So it shows that CO2 regulation can really drive sales and force basically OEMs to bring those models to their customers and they've prepared for that. And if you look at the -- yes, if you look at the analysis, there's some analysis out there of what increase those OEMs need to realize, and that some of the analysis is 40% to 70% more EV sales to be able to meet those targets and avoid, yes, penalties from the regulator.

So I think it's really -- in that sense, it's also really good to understand sort of it's a bit of a step change in that regulation. So in the period 2020 to 2024 targets of 115.1 gram CO2, according to the WLTP cycle, applied in that regulation. And from 2025 onwards up until 2029, it's 93.6 grams of CO2 per kilometer. So that gap, you can only fill that by selling a significant portion of EVs to lower that average and that is basically what's driving. So you could say 2024 was one of the, yes, one of the final years of a period where they could still sell significantly higher portion of fossil cars, which they have been trying to do. And they need to also, in that sense, shift that momentum to sell significantly more EVs in 2025. So I think you really see that Osborne effect, the newer models, everything needs to come together in that year to get that going.

Yes. Understood. And do you see an impact on charging and demand for electricity if more affordable cars become available, would it have an impact on battery performance and the size of the battery and the electricity required?

Yes. So then you're talking about sort of the, let's say, the average charge speed of the market and the size of sessions and the size of the battery. I think what you see there, and I think it's difficult for us to pinpoint that exactly. But we've seen sort of an 8% to 10% sort of order of magnitude increase year-on-year since, let's say, 2013 on charge speeds from -- coming from, let's say, 33-, 35-kilowatt average in more than 10 years ago and slowly growing as a consequence of the number of cars on the road, their size of the battery and the charging technology, right? I think what we'll see is in that sense that these newer models that are coming to market, they have batteries, which are actually pretty sizable because the battery price has gone down significantly and the technology on how to charge them has improved over time as well. And they come with -- or many of them come with preheating systems in their navigation. So on the one hand, there are reasons to say, like what you say, like if you bring cheaper cars to the market, would they have lower tech abilities. On the other hand, those tech abilities have also progressed. So I think bringing it all together, we just think that the entire market will continue on that growth curve, increasing charge speed and increasing charge session sizes. Does that give you a bit of color? I think it's more like about the drivers than the actuals, but I think that it does bring all the elements together in that sense.

Our next question is Thymen Rundberg from ING.

Two questions from my side. The first one on the balance sheet, the cash position of EUR 117 million is a bit less than what we had expected for the end of 2024. And looking at the current year '25 with increasing cash out also related to both maintaining the current network as well as expanding it, we've seen that the network operating costs are expected to increase very sharply in 2025. And as well, we see some retail bonds maturing later in the year. But on the other hand, we see the dialing down of the station rollout guidance for 2025, so that will reduce the cash need. To what extent are you being conservative with the balance sheet and looking at the full year ahead? And what can you say about the retail bond funding strategy in '25 in terms of number of tranches? And then the second question I have is on the court case in Germany. It's something that has been going on for quite a while already. We've seen that late last year, I think it was October or so, there was an update with the Advocate General from European Court of Justice who presented his opinion to the European Court of Justice, which is -- where his conclusions were more or less supporting a decision from Autobahn to allow Tank & Rast to add fast chargers to the concessions. So what is your view on this? And if you have any updates on the potential time line?

Let me start on the balance sheet. So with our cash position with the expected rollout, like I said, we expect to -- we'll be able to fund the 2025 rollout. Additionally, we'll do retail bonds again this year and there we target, again, 2 to 3 tranches. And that will -- yes, like we have seen last year, we raised EUR 82 million in retail bonds. And that's -- yes, so that shows that it's a big lever we can pull and a big funding pool at the same -- and funding pool that where you see that the conditions are, for us, very flexible in terms of no security, no financial covenants and also providing a nice coupon to the retail investor. So I think that is key. We're also investigating bank financing, like I mentioned last time, as well. That's becoming available to the market, and that's something we're investigating as well. And we see banks being very keen and eager to invest in market leader like us. So we're investigating that and hopefully we can provide some further updates to that later this year.

Yes. And then maybe on the court case, I think what you see is there's basically two very different opinions. I think one is the Advocate General, which is not necessarily something that also courts follow, that is an opinion. And there's the opinion from the European Commission itself that is very much saying it's a separate industry, we recommend tenders, et cetera, et cetera. So that I think is one thing. The verdict is to be awaited. I think it's difficult to say in that sense for us. We provided our arguments and we, of course, have a lot of belief in that, otherwise, we wouldn't go there. I think what's important in that sense is to say in which context is this court case there because in the end there's court cases, we have our regulatory public affairs work across the board, across all of Europe. And a bigger picture, I think, is that, one, is for the German case, there's no one that likes a situation with a monopolist that is not investing and not supporting the market growth. Two is I think what you also see is that, yes, across Europe, the idea of simply allowing incumbent petrol stations to have a sole exclusive rights to add chargers to their concession, that is not a situation that resonates anyway with government. So I think the context in which we bring this court case, I think, is very supportive. Of course, there is then also a very legalistic sort of special element to this case, and we'll have to see what the verdict on that is. So that is a bit of color on the topic. But yes, for the rest, we'll just have to wait the verdict, which is not due to come in the coming 2 months from what we know. Does that give you a bit of color on it because it's not a full answer, but there's just no more information I can give you.

Our next question is from Nikita Lal from Deutsche Bank.

I would have also two. The first is on your shops. So it's great to see the success of your shops. Do you have a rough idea how many stations do not have any amenities nearby, so would be potential targets for manned or unmanned shops? And what could be the size of the revenue stream over the next years? And my second question is regarding your 2030 guidance. I mean, you confirmed it. And I understand that this should be feasible by the ramp-up of the BEV share. But could you elaborate a little bit more here? Do you expect a linear increase or a stronger step-up more towards the end of the decade?

Yes, Nikita, thanks a lot for the question. I think I don't fully sort of understand your final question, but maybe let's iterate that after, let's say, answering your discussion on shops. I think when looking at it, I think, yes, we see basically, I think, 3 categories. Like one is locations where we're extremely happy with the situation on site where there is a great set of amenities and we do what we do best, adding charging. Then two is, I think there's sites where, yes, we would benefit from additional amenities. For example, closer to our station or toilets that are not ideal or a more -- faster sort of type of amenities. For example, if there's a restaurant that doesn't cater for, let's say, the quick coffee or isn't open in the morning. And then there's the final category and that's basically greenfield sites, so sites where there's nothing. I think if you look at that, I think we're talking probably a high level on, let's saying, 20% maybe is greenfield at the moment and 80% is of the other 2 categories. Providing half of it may be an opportunity to do something. Then maybe on the revenue stream, we can expect -- I think that's still something -- yes. We're piloting. We're in pilot mode. I think what I explained in those 2 slides is also like we will really have to see we're not only providing these amenities then in the end for just electric drivers. Anyone can stop over and grab a coffee. And we'll need to see like what kind of a percentage of a catch rate do you get directly on traffic that's looking for coffee, but not just for charging. So that's still something we really need more shops for and more data to give you an outlook on that. And then maybe the 2025 target?

I guess, on the 2030 guidance, I guess you're talking about number of stations, right, how that ramps up?

Yes. And also then revenues yes.

Yes. Yes, so the number of stations is, yes, we're ramping up from a pace of 50 to 60 per year in the years past to follow sort of the trajectory that now the location acquisition has taken, so more than 100 per year. And that's each year ramping up. And as of this year, we're guiding for roughly 50 to 80 stations per year. And that's -- yes, we'll ramp that up to higher levels. So that's a gradual ramp-up. In terms of revenues, it's going to be similar in the sense that if you look at Slide 6, the BEV fleet growth, that really defines the revenue, also our revenue growth, and you see also a gradual ramp-up. So it's not linear. Yes, it's more the ramp-up you see on that Slide 6 or what like I described before. I hope that provides an answer.

And our next question is from Thijs Berkelder from ABN AMRO ODDO BHF.

Two main questions. I think prime reason for the stock to come down is your 2025 guidance and then especially the guidance on what you expect on the operational EBITDA margin midpoint, 37.5%, with consensus being at 45%. Because you've recently lifted your retail tariffs and the cost price of electricity probably [indiscernible] I would say gross profitability is to only go further up, the gross margins to go up. So then the lower operational EBITDA margin guidance is clearly related to, yes, 3 main cost factors: your expectations on grid costs, on maintenance costs and probably on start-up costs for rolling out all your retail outlets. Can you somewhat better quantify how many start-ups you expect -- start-up costs you expect to build into the 2025? What is included in the 2025 guidance? And what kind of retail revenues are you already including in your revenue guidance? And on grid cost looking at Q4 data, I would assume a grid cost of something like 13 -- grid fee, something like EUR 13 million in '24. Will this sort of double then in 2025? So that's the first question. And the second is that a question or more a remark. Operationally, you're really best in class and you're receiving Google ratings of 4-plus versus 2 to 3 for the all majors. Probably also your retail bondholders gives you a Google rating of 4-plus with your equity investors probably give you more a Google rating or something like 1 or 2. So question is, from now on, what will you be doing to also improve the Google rating for the equity investors? And/or related to that, is the new guidance now meet or beat guidance? Is it the purpose to, during the year, preferably lift guidance step by step?

Thijs, maybe checking if you hear me, we had a small slight problem with the microphone.

Yes, I hear you.

That's good, that's good.

Yes. Maybe starting off on operational EBITDA margin. It's basically, well, 2 or 3 main things. One is we lowered our revenue per station expectation based on simply lower EV fleet growth than we expected at Charging Day. But even if you look at the forecast of earlier last year and that, of course, with operational leverage, has an impact on operational EBITDA. Secondly is staff costs and that is the staff to operate the network. As we see the step change in location acquisition and also expect to be able to follow that step change in construction -- constructing those stations in the next 1 or 2 years, that also means that you need more people to run that network. And that is really -- yes, that we are able to prepare for. We have the opportunity to sign those locations, build those locations and run them. We think that's a massive opportunity, but it also means that we need to invest in that staff and that has an impact this year on operational EBITDA margin. And then thirdly is grid fees. That has an impact, but it's slightly smaller than the staff costs. And I think, yes, you want to follow-up on that?

Yes. I think maybe my take, if I make it really simple, Thijs, I think for me, it's basically like the somewhat slower BEV uptake as a consequence of a lower revenue per station and the fact that we're continuing to invest in the future because we see that market, that means that investments in the future, you see that as a lower -- a slightly lower EBITDA margin.

And I think on your second question, I think we set guidance at Charging Day 3 years ago. And we're basically tripling, doubling on 3 different aspects. I think that's -- and we achieved -- either achieved it or almost achieved that. I think that's quite a feat, to be honest. This time, we set guidance in a different way. Basically, we don't have to forecast 3 years out on 3 different items. We forecast 1 year out. We want to do that prudently and that's what we have done this year. So in that sense, we need to fine-tune on how we set guidance and we do that -- we try to do that in a prudent...

Yes. Now fully understandable and appreciated. Coming back on, let's say, maybe what has changed in terms of accounting standards then. I had impression until today, let's say, that expansion-related costs were booked below the operational EBITDA line, not in the operational EBITDA line. And your operational EBITDA margin in Q4 was 45%. There you already step up in terms of staff base on the network available. What is then really going on in maintenance cost? Is there a sudden cable theft or so or lower charger reliability? What...

No, it's really -- so we have also indicated in the appendix of the presentation we indicated our FTEs, that's really people, indeed, last year, but also this year we'll increase our staff substantially and that's people working on running the network. So that's part of the software team, it's part of the commercial team, it's part of the operations team, the customer support, the mechanics that run the network and that's -- and we -- basically, the increase in FTEs we see this year is across the board. It's in expansion, it's in operation and it's also in the general staff. And so part of that is in operation.

Yes. I think a good example, Thijs, if you want to have an anecdote, I think we're building our first stations in Italy and Spain, for example. You can't -- there's no business case of having your own, let's say, mechanic on the road there for a single station. On the other hand, you do want to build the bases locally in local language. You want to build the local knowledge base, a person that can start up the bases to operate and maintain a set of stations in that country. And that is the investments that are not reflected in what you say, like, let's say, the network expansion costs. They are coming into our main normal operational costs for the stations. But they are basically a consequence of us making the organization ready for a significantly bigger network. So that is a bit, let's say, the [ Babylon-ical ] difference in understanding the two. Does that make sense?

Yes. Of course, it makes sense with the financial investors. Yes, they prefer to have a clear split between, let's say, existing operations and new operations and then much better understand what you're communicating. That's what I mean.

Yes, yes. I follow you.

We will now move to our next question from Paul de Froment from Bryan Garnier & Co.

So two quick questions for me. The first one, did you start to replace some of your charging points? And the second question is, could you come back on the decrease of your organic utilization rate in 2024, please?

So replacing charges, we've actually done a lot of that, yes, basically in 2023, 2022 and 2021 actually when we had -- still had a lot of 50-kilowatt chargers in the fields. And we replaced many of them already before last year. So last year, we actually didn't replace much. There's a slide in the appendix where we show the current chargers and also the charge fees, which gives you an indication of, yes, what is left still of the 50-kilowatt chargers. And by the way, we've been operating those chargers since 2013. So a lot of them already were also depreciated, to a large extent, and we've sold many of them. I think your second question, I didn't...

I got something like utilization rate, but maybe let's check if I got it correct there, Paul.

Just the -- from what I saw in your presentation, but maybe I'm wrong, but in the like-for-like utilization rates in 2024 compared to 2023. And if you could explain the decrease, please?

Yes. So that's like with like-for-like utilization rate, we want to show that what utilization last quarter would have been if we would not have expanded capacity, and then it would have been 16.8% instead of 14.9%. And then, yes, the decrease from last year is that simply early periods before last year we expanded capacity less. So I hope I explained it myself well. But yes, if we increased the number of charge per station, that, of course, has a reduction effect on utilization. So the more strongly we do that...

Okay. So it comes from the increase of the average number of charging point utilization and that the station -- okay. So that's was my question.

That increase was stronger in 2023. And last year, we -- that increase was a bit lower than 2023. It shows that now we're at 6 chargers per station, also in line with the guidance we gave on Charging Day. So we're nearing sort of the, yes, capacity at the 8 charger per station capacity we indicated before. So that means we don't need to increase it that much anymore. I hope that provides a bit of a picture.

We'll now take our last question in the queue today from Joren Van Aken from the Degroof Petercam.

Two quick ones as well. I'm actually quite positive on the level of acquired locations that you have now. So going into 2025, are there some important tenders upcoming that you are looking forward to? That's question one. And then question number two is just a little detail. On Slide 20, you show -- you mentioned that the London and Deutschland net tenders and their accounting treatment are still being clarified by auditors. Can you explain a bit more what the debate or issue is here?

Yes. I think maybe from my side, a bit of -- some words on location acquisitions, I think it's really good that you point out that, that is a great number. We're very happy with it as well. And I think it's actually also -- it's a key number at this stage of the market to look at. I think looking at the coming year, I think what we, one, will continue to do is getting that location speeds on those private sites to go up and up and up because that is something that is a one-for-one deal-making process that is less dependent on tenders. Two is we do expect and we will see more and more tenders coming out as a consequence of AVERE. I think the most work that we're currently seeing is on Spain, on the French, let's say, non-toll road networks and partly also a group of on-toll road sites coming up. I think there might be some stuff in new markets, thinking about Poland and so on, but that is less, let's say, I think, important to our goals in that sense. And we have Italy, where we looked at over the last year, but we currently see that the tender landscape, let's say, from a business case perspective isn't -- doesn't allow for the investments in very proper stations yet. So we're still under discussions there with regulators in getting advocacy working there to see a tender landscape that's much more fit for changing also the landscape to proper infrastructure for electric cars. So that on tenders. So yes, it's something that is not, let's say, very, very clear now. I think it will come more clear in the coming months what we'll see later this year. And then maybe on accounting, can you say something on this, Victor?

Yes. Maybe emphasizing the location acquisition pace. I think it's -- the ones in this market that are able to get those high-traffic locations and have a great charging concept, I think that's really going to define who's going to be the leaders or the winners in the market. So I fully agree that is the key metric to look at. I think on accounting treatment, we have a couple of things on that. So one is the regional tender in Germany where we get a CapEx contribution from the German government that we repay through a revenue share and it's kept at the total number of that contribution, and that basically makes it an interest-free loan. That's one. Two is the German highway tender, where actually we're building stations and delivering them to the highway authority, so we're acting more as a construction company, and operate them for 8 years. So that, again, is a different accounting treatment. And then the London JV, that's a joint venture where we invest 51% and Transport for London or Places for London actually invests 49%. So we also need to look at the accounting treatment of that. So there are 3 things that we are detailing together with our advisers and the auditor to get to the right accounting treatment of that, and we'll provide a further update on that when we release the annual report end of March.

Let's say, the color on the tender landscape. I think does that give you a bit of logic? I think it's not very clear yet what we'll see coming there. So does it give you a bit of information that you were looking for, Joren? I think it's good. Okay. I would say thanks, everyone, for listening and looking forward to see you on again in -- at the end of Q1 with the publication also of the annual report and the Q1 figures.

Yes. Thanks, all. Bye-bye.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect.