Who are all the companies involved?
Same charger, a moment later. The display has turned green.
Look around: the brand on the charger, the sign over the car park, the app on the driver's phone, the cable leading to a grey cabinet at the edge of the site.
The questionHow many companies are involved in this one moment, and what does each of them do?
Guess firstThe charger carries the brand “VoltFast”. Whose customer is the driver?RevealHide
Not necessarily VoltFast's. In contract-based charging, the driver is the customer of the company that issued the card or app, the eMSP. VoltFast operates the charger and is paid by that eMSP for the session. The brand on the charger and the name on the invoice often belong to two different businesses.
Each role can be a separate company.
One brand, several roles
The roles explain the market better than the company names.
- Operating chargers is a local, asset-intensive business: sites, hardware, availability and service.
- Serving drivers is a customer business: an app, contracts, prices and invoices.
The two call for different strengths, so they are often run by different companies. Where one company holds both roles, each still follows its own economics.
15,471 companies operate the public charge points in the directory data. A small number of large networks run most of them, while almost 13,000 operators, such as car dealers, hotels or local businesses, run fewer than ten each. Charge points with a named operator, grouped by the operator's network size.
How much of a country's public charging the three largest operators run differs widely: in Germany about a tenth, in Spain more than half. Countries with an official charging registry, share of all public charge points.
Check your understanding
4 questions. Answer all of them to complete this stop. Each answer explains itself.
A charger shows brand X, support calls go to company Y and your invoice comes from app Z. Who operates the charger?
Operating means carrying uptime and support. Branding and driver billing are different jobs, often held by different parties.
Which party's decision usually dates back furthest before a session can happen?
Grid connections are planned long before a site opens. They are usually the longest step of a charging project.
Why do the CPO and eMSP jobs attract different kinds of companies?
Infrastructure and customer software follow different economics, so the roles are often held by different companies.
One company operates chargers and also issues a charging app. How should you analyse it?
Roles are the unit of analysis. The two businesses behave differently, even inside one company.
- emobility.directory: Charge point operators in Europe, from national registries of 8 countries and OpenChargeMap; Switzerland, Greece, Luxembourg and Poland left out, data as of 28 Sep 2026. https://emobility.directory/. Checked 28 Sep 2026. Charging data: Bundesnetzagentur.de (CC BY 4.0); IRVE, transport.data.gouv.fr (Licence Ouverte 2.0); NDW (CC0); DGT (CC BY); Fintraffic / digitraffic.fi (CC BY 4.0); Via Lietuva (CC BY 4.0); NOBIL by Enova (CC BY 4.0); Open Charge Map contributors (CC BY 4.0), including public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v2.0; combined and calculated by emobility.directory.
- emobility.directory: Charge point operators in Europe, from national registries of 8 countries and OpenChargeMap; Switzerland, Greece, Luxembourg and Poland left out, data as of 28 Sep 2026. https://emobility.directory/. Checked 28 Sep 2026. Charging data: Bundesnetzagentur.de (CC BY 4.0); IRVE, transport.data.gouv.fr (Licence Ouverte 2.0); NDW (CC0); DGT (CC BY); Fintraffic / digitraffic.fi (CC BY 4.0); Via Lietuva (CC BY 4.0); NOBIL by Enova (CC BY 4.0); Open Charge Map contributors (CC BY 4.0), including public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v2.0; combined and calculated by emobility.directory.