Exicom acquires Australian EV charger maker Tritium; stock jumps 5%

Exicom Tele-Systems Ltd, a homegrown electric vehicle charger manufacturer, on Thursday said its unit Exicom Power Solutions B.V. Netherlands and other step-down subsidiaries have entered into an agreement to acquire Australia-based DC fast chargers maker Tritium for $29.63 million.

Reacting to the development, shares of Exicom rose 5% to hit a high of ₹411.65 apiece on the BSE.

With over 13,000 DC fast chargers sold in 47 countries, Tritium, founded in 2001, designs and manufactures proprietary hardware and software to create DC fast chargers for electric vehicles.

Exicom says the deal will unlock substantial long-term growth and value for its stakeholders. The acquisition adds Tritium’s manufacturing facility in Tennessee, USA, as well as an engineering centre in Brisbane, Australia to Exicom’s existing presence in Asia.

The acquisition expands Exicom’s global reach and provides an opportunity to serve the different use cases across the world and expand EV infrastructure adoption, the company says.

“Exicom and Tritium have a complementary sales and product footprint and have each established leadership in their respective regions,” says Anant Nahata, CEO, Exicom.

“Our outlook for EV business remains strong but has suffered slowdown this quarter because of degrowth of electric cars and buses in the first quarter, which was partially due to removal of FAME-II subsidy for four-wheeler as well as the high inventory levels that some of our customers continue to have going into the current financial years,” Nahata says during the company’s first quarter earnings call.

In the EV segment, Exicom focuses on passenger cars and electric buses. “Those are the vehicle segments that we seek to electrify across homes, highways, city infrastructure by providing various kind of chargers. And while FY'23 to FY'24, there was 85% growth of the vehicles in the last two financial years. However, in quarter-on-quarter, so quarter 1 FY'25 versus quarter 4 FY'24, there was almost 13% degrowth as per Vahaan Portal data,” says Nahata.

The key reason for this degrowth is the removal of the FAME II subsidy from April 2024 for the four-wheeler fleet market.

Nahata, however, adds that the industry always adjusts because total cost of ownership is still very beneficial for fleets to purchase electric vehicles even in the absence of subsidy, but whenever it is removed for momentarily there is a dip in that segment.

Exicom says its distributed chargers are increasingly popular because of fleet charging, large car parks and bus depots especially. These chargers have higher utilisation rates.

Exicom’s critical power business grew 16% year-on-year based on consistent demand for its lithium-ion battery solutions and various types of power management solutions, particularly hybrid power solutions because of uptake of renewable energy in the telecom sector.