China to-date has 89,000 existing charging piles companies

With the new energy vehicle (NEV) market expanding, China is vigorously pushing ahead with the construction of relevant infrastructures. Of those, charging pile should be the biggest highlight.

As of December 14, 2020, the registrations of domestic existing companies engaging in charging pile business totaled 89,000, according to the corporate data platform Qichacha (Qcc.com).

Qcc.com's data show that the registrations of new charging pile-related companies were keeping climbing year by year. In 2016, the annual number stood at only 6,400, then exceeded 10,000 in 2018 and hit 18,600 in 2019. For the first eleven months, a total of 20,800 companies were newly registered.

As for the regional distribution, the top 3 provinces by the registrations of existing charging pile firms were Guangdong, Jiangsu and Shandong. Guangdong currently has 14,700 companies, which were more than doubled over the runner-up Jiangsu. The number of existing charging pile companies in Shangdong, Henan and Hunan all topped 5,000.

China will provide fiscal support for the construction of charging piles as communal facilities, according to the planning for 2021-2035 development of NEV industry issued by the State Council on Nov. 2.

Many local governments have also released their targets in the development of charging piles and stimulus policies. Guangdong province aims to build around 180,000 charging piles by 2022, and construct an operational system involving an orderly charging network with transferable load, V2G (vehicle-to-grid) and the integration of charging, discharging and energy storage, the provincial government said in a three-year (2020-2022) planning issued last month.

The government of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, decided this month to grant subsidies worth over 25.49 million yuan ($3.9 million) to 27 companies working on the construction and operation of charging infrastructures, in a bid to speed up NEV promotion.