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A Tesla EV charging plug with a ChargePoint logo.
Courtesy Chargepoint
EV charging stocks were rallying early Tuesday in response to the latest news about companies switching over to use
Tesla
-style EV charging plugs.
Investors are still having some trouble making sense of EV charging in the wake of Tesla’s (ticker: TSLA) decision to open up its supercharging network to other EV drivers.
That decision effectively gave Elon Musk’s company a victory in the North American standards war about the shape of the plug that will charge U.S. EVs in the future. There is more technology in an EV plug than in a gas pump, but that’s a reasonable oversimplification. “It’s as simple as changing a plug,”
Wallbox
(ticker: WBX) CEO Enric Asuncion told Barron’s this past week.
Investors haven’t seen it that way. Coming into Tuesday trading, stock in Wallbox, an EV charging company, was down about 13% since the late May Tesla-Ford announcement that opened up the
Tesla
(TSLA) charging network to
Ford Motor
(F) drivers.
General Motors
(GM) and
Rivian Automotive
(RIVN) have followed with similar announcements since then.
Shares of the EV charging company
ChargePoint
were also down about 8% over that span, while the
Nasdaq Composite
was up about 5%. ChargePoint stock bounced early Tuesday though, with a gain of 2.4% in premarket trading, only to slip back for a gain of 0.3% after the open. Wallbox stock was doing better, up 3.9%.
The market is helping some. The
S&P 500
and Nasdaq are up 0.4% and 0.5%, respectively. ChargePoint is helping, too. The company announced “NACS solutions for new and existing EV-charging deployments, enabling customers to continue to serve any EV in any parking space.”
NACS, or the North American Charging Standard, is the Tesla plug. It isn’t taking long for the EV charging industry to adapt. (Get it?)
Tesla stock has risen about $51 a share, or 31%, since the
Ford
-Tesla deal. That move added about $180 billion in market value.
To be sure, charging isn’t responsible for all of the stock gains. Excitement over artificial Intelligence helped. Tesla’s rise also happened after
Nvidia
,
which makes chips required for AI computing, turned in much better-than-expected first-quarter results. Tesla also has an AI angle: It uses the technology to train and improve its self-driving systems.
Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi wrote recently that the NACS plug is going to become standard and that Tesla could generate sales of $12 billion a year from its charging network by 2030. That’s the revenue Tesla would get from operating its own chain of what are essentially EV gas stations.
It isn’t enough to move him off his bearish view, though. He rates shares Sell and has a $150 price target for the stock.
If Tesla earns gas-station-like profit margins on the $12 billion it would mean roughly $1 billion in additional earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda. Based on recent valuation multiples, that could be worth as much as $20 billion in value for Tesla shareholders.
With shares up about $180 billion, perhaps that means $160 billion of Tesla’s gain is AI-related and $20 billion is the charging impact.
That’s just a guess and a rule of thumb. The value of EV charging stocks such as ChargePoint is down roughly $1 billion. Perhaps that is the market’s estimation of the value taken by Tesla with non-Tesla EVs pulling up to Tesla chargers.
Tesla has about half of the fast chargers in the U.S. But better charging infrastructure also means more EV sales, which benefit the entire industry.
Looking at the value changes, it’s also possible the market hasn’t worked it all out correctly yet.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
