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A Tesla EV charging socket with a ChargePoint logo.
Courtesy charging station
Electric vehicle charging stocks rallied early Tuesday in response to the latest news on companies switching to use
You’re here
style EV charging sockets.
Investors are still struggling to understand EV charging following Tesla’s (ticker: TSLA) decision to open up its charging network to other EV drivers.
The move effectively gave Elon Musk’s company a victory in the North American standards war over the shape of the plug that will charge US electric vehicles in the future. There’s more technology in an EV plug than in a gas pump, but that’s a reasonable oversimplification. “It’s as easy as changing a plug,”
Wall box
(ticker: WBX) CEO Enric Asuncion said Barrons last week.
Investors didn’t see it that way. As markets opened on Tuesday, shares of Wallbox, an electric vehicle charging company, were down about 13% since the late May announcement of Tesla-Ford opening the market.
You’re here
(TSLA) charging network for
Ford engine
(F) drivers.
General Motors
(GM) and
Rivian Automotive
(RIVN) have followed up with similar announcements since then.
Shares of electric vehicle charging company
Charging point
also declined by around 8% during this period, while
Nasdaq Compound
was up about 5%. ChargePoint stock rebounded early Tuesday, however, with a 2.4% gain in premarket trading, only to fall 0.3% after the open. Wallbox shares were doing better, up 3.9%.
The market helps some. THE
S&P500
and the Nasdaq are up 0.4% and 0.5%, respectively. ChargePoint also helps. The company announced “NACS solutions for new and existing electric vehicle charging deployments, allowing customers to continue to service any electric vehicle in any parking space.”
NACS, or North American Charging Standard, is Tesla’s plug. The electric vehicle charging industry is quick to adapt. (Find?)
Tesla stock has risen about $51 per share, or 31%, since the
Ford
-Tesla case. This decision added approximately $180 billion in market value.
Certainly, invoicing is not responsible for all stock market gains. The excitement around artificial intelligence has helped. Tesla’s rise also happened after
Nvidia
,
which makes the chips needed to compute AI, performed much better than expected in the first quarter. Tesla also has an artificial intelligence angle: it uses technology to train and improve its self-driving systems.
Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi wrote recently that the NACS plug will become the norm and that Tesla could generate $12 billion in sales a year from its charging network by 2030. That’s the income that Tesla would make from operating its own string of what is essentially EV gas. stations.
However, this is not enough to shake him out of his bearish view. He rates the stock for sale and has a price target of $150 for the stock.
If Tesla achieves gas station-like profit margins on the $12 billion, that would mean about $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 to Tesla shareholders.
With shares up around $180 billion, that might mean $160 billion of Tesla’s gain is AI-related and $20 billion is impact charging.
This is just a guess and a rule of thumb. The value of electric vehicle charging stocks such as ChargePoint fell by about $1 billion. This may be the market estimate of the value taken by Tesla with non-Tesla electric vehicles pulling towards Tesla chargers.
Tesla owns about half of the fast chargers in the United States. But better charging infrastructure also means more electric vehicle sales, which benefits the entire industry.
Looking at the changes in value, it’s also possible that the market hasn’t calculated everything correctly yet.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com