BP axes jobs and scales back its EV charging business

Oil and gas giant BP is slashing jobs at its electric vehicle charging business and pulling out of several markets as its big bet on rapid growth in commercial EV fleets “didn’t pay off,” according to company sources.

BP CEO Murray Auchincloss is making the changes at its EV charging arm, BP Pulse, to quell investor doubts over its plan to shift away from Big Oil and Gas to green energy, reports Reuters.

In recent months, BP Pulse has pulled out of eight of the 12 countries it was operating in, with now the focus solely on the US, Britain, Germany, and China, where it expects to see the fastest growth in the EV market.

More than 100 jobs out of a global workforce of 900 have been cut, with many employees being moved around to other divisions with “only a handful leaving the company,” the sources told Reuters.

This is happening too as Tesla is laying off more than 10% of its global workforce, according to an internal memo procured by Electrek.

EV charging has been one of five essential growth sectors for BP, which had more than 29,000 charging points around the world at the end of last year, compared to 22,000 in 2022. Its goal is to have 100,000 by 2030.

Still, despite the cuts, BP assures that its EV ambitions are on track and that the recent changes are a mere “step towards ensuring that we can execute our goals with even greater precision and effectiveness.”

BP initially expected commercial car fleets to rapidly switch to EVs at a mass scale, but that didn’t happen in part due to governments easing mandates for EV adoption, Auchincloss said in February. “We thought fleets would move first. But given recessionary pressures and some relief from governments, fleets have slowed down,” he said, according to the report.

Still, BP is expecting it EV charging and convenience stores to bring in $1.5 billion by 2025. In 2022, BP Pulse announced it would invest up to £1 billion in the UK’s EV charging infrastructure and up to €100 million in Germany’s EV charging infrastructure by 2030. In January of last year, BP also launched Europe’s first truck charging corridor in Germany, a game-changer that allows electric trucks to cover more than 455 miles across multiple routes throughout the country.

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