Fastned saw its first two stations break even in March. This means that the operating expenses, such as the purchase of power, grid connection fees, licence costs, land lease, cleaning and maintenance costs were covered by the revenues generated at those stations.
Fastned expects that more stations will pass the break-even point in the coming months.
The operating costs per station are limited. All 58 Fastned stations are unmanned and centrally managed from the head office. The next financial goal is to also cover these central operating expenses. Since these costs remain relatively stable when new stations are added to the network, the costs per station will decrease when new stations are added to the network. The final step to profitability of the company is also to cover depreciation and finance costs.
The Fastned stations are prepared for strong growth of the number of electric cars. The capacity can easily be expanded by adding more and faster chargers to each station. The low operating costs and big capacity result in significant earning potential of each station.
In a Year-on-Year comparison with the same quarter of 2016, Fastned’s volume, revenue and number of active customers showed strong growth in the first quarter of 2017. Currently, Fastned has 3,520 active customers. The company has started construction of 6 new stations, bringing the total number of stations to 63 before summer.
Currently there are around 15,000 fully electric cars in The Netherlands; 40% more than a year ago. Almost half of this growth was achieved since January of this year, caused in part by favourable fiscal incentives. In March, the percentage of electric cars as part of the total number of new cars sold in the Netherlands grew to over 2%. Fastned expects that this percentage will continue to increase as more and more attractive electric car models with bigger ranges are introduced to the market.
[source: Fastned]
