China’s largest ride-hailing platform Didi Chuxing announced on Wednesday that it has entered a strategic partnership with China Southern Power Grid to develop on-demand EV charging and automobile services across South and Southwest China, according to a press release by Didi.
Under this partnership the grid operator’s charging network will be connected to DiDi’s open auto-solutions platform, allowing their mutual customer bases to access charging spots through DiDi apps.
The grid operator’s EV charging network now connects over 100,000 charging points across Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hainan.
China Southern Power Grid expects to have another 12,000 charging points coming online in 2019, said Didi, adding that it and its partner drivers now operate the world’s largest electric vehicle fleet, with over 600,000 EVs registered to the platform.
Several of China’s EV charging service providers—including TGood, Star Charge, iCharge, and others—announced in April that they would no longer support Didi Chuxing’s EV charging network.
TGood has over 120,000 charging stations while Star Charge has upwards of 30,000 stations.
Didi spokeman told KrAsia on Wednesday that “the recent development involves 3 out of over 100 of our EV recharging partners and doesn’t affect our business materially”.
He added that “600,000 EVs run on Didi and we bring invaluable scale potentials to our energy partners in a network that continues to expand to serve tens of millions of Didi and non-Didi drivers and carowners. We will continue to increase the ranks of our charging partners throughout 2019.”
