LAURENCE CHAN, President & Founder of HONG KONG EV POWER speaks on the shape of the charging industry.


New energy vehicles have been the hottest trend on the market since the middle of last year. Information and policies are issued daily related to the electric vehicles. The data released by China Automobile Industry Association showed that in terms of production and sales of the new energy vehicles in 2015, China ranked number one world-wide. To ride the trend, EV Power started in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in 2014 by investing capital and technology into the market, and improve the experience, which had been gained through serving users in Hong Kong starting from 2010. Excerpts for our talks with Laurence Chan.

MZ: What niche does your company fill to differentiate itself from others?

Laurance Chan: The charging pole industry that has benefited because of the national policy bonus and also has attracted much investment. But the development of the industry is still in the immature stage, which makes the enterprise still operate at a huge cost, and the profit mode remains unclear.

EV Power will not take the form of O2O adopted in the past two or three years to blindly run business at a huge cost on the market, instead, we will adopt the mode combining the long-term operation with the short-term operation to achieve the balance of receipts and payments. The ultimate difficulty for the electric vehicle users must be the solution to home charging, so other suppliers only focus on constructing public charging stations outside, which cannot truly meet customer demand. But EV Power, taking the advantage of the background of our investors and property resources it has owned in the mainland, can rapidly create influence in the mainland, provides the charging service in more than 1,000 locations yearly, and resolve concerns of the electric vehicle users.

MZ: How does your company offer more value than its competitors?

LC: When people cheer heartily for convenience and pollution-free features brought by the new energy vehicles, they have to face a problem of promoting them. The problem is how to install and use the charging piles after the community residents buying new energy vehicles. In the mainland market, we have a strong property relationship to offer users the ultimate solution to the problem of home charging, as well as users’ concerns before buying the vehicles and the users’ funds pressure to install the charger. In terms of the mall, we mainly construct the fast charging stations as supply for some users who do not have the charger at home to use electric vehicles in the first place, and then try to solve the problem of home charging.

MZ: What obstacles have you faced in the HK market and how have you overcome them?

LC: As the pioneer of the EV charging service provider, we always strive to improve the services and make breakthrough to existing hurdles in the market.

One of the vivid example is that we believe home charging is the only solution to promote the wider use of electric vehicles in private sector in Hong Kong. However, it is more and more difficult for an individual user to set up home charging facilities in the residential apartments due to many issues such as limited electricity power source, high initial cost of construction, rejection of Property Managers and Incorporated Owners for the application, etc.

In order to make our vision “Make Everywhere EV Ready, Lead EV Ready Everywhere”, we have launched the “Private EV Charging Service – Residential Apartment Scheme (RAS)” in late 2014. We take care of the initial capital investments and the subsequent operations of the charging infrastructure in the whole residential carparks with obtaining the approval of Property Managers and Incorporated Owners, while individual EV users can simply apply and pay a monthly fee for the EV charging services at their own parking spaces. Therefore, RAS highly eases the setup of home charging facilities and relieve most of the concerns of Property Managers and Incorporated Owners in order to provide the WIN-WIN-WIN situations for the sustainable growth of the use of EV in Hong Kong.

For additional information please visit www.hkevpower.com