Zaptec reported its second quarter on August 19. Revenue of 506 MNOK against 383 MNOK a year earlier, EBITDA of 69 MNOK at a 14 percent margin against 44 MNOK and 11 percent, order intake of 894 MNOK and a backlog of 1,119 MNOK. Gross margin held at 41 percent. Available liquidity stood at 715 MNOK after paying a 175 MNOK dividend, two kroner a share.
The regional split is the part that lands closest to home. In Zaptec's three largest markets, year on year for the quarter:
- Benelux: +117%
- Sweden: +26%
- Norway: +2%
Germany, outside that top three, grew 197 percent, which the company attributes to installer adoption, wider distribution and the first deliveries under its Sonepar partnership. Zaptec counted over 82,000 installations across Europe in the quarter, with a June record of close to a thousand a day.
For context, this is the same half-year in which Alfen's EV charging revenue fell 17.4 percent and its charge point volumes fell 12.3 percent. Two makers, one market, opposite directions. Demand for AC charging in the Benelux is not the variable that moved.
The sentence in the board's own report
Buried in the half-year statement, past the highlights, is this:
The Group's growth and investments are in line with previously communicated outlook, however the ramp-up of sales in certain markets, e.g. France and Germany, has been somewhat slower than previously anticipated due to prolonged time frames to adapt the Group's product offerings to relevant regulatory law and regulations.
A company growing 197 percent in Germany is saying that market took longer than it should have, and the reason is that the product had to be adapted to each country's rules before it could sell there.
That is worth sitting with, because it is a hardware company describing a hardware constraint. Grid codes, metering law, installation standards and grant conditions differ per country. When those differences are handled inside the charger, every new market is a product project with a lead time, and every rule change afterwards is a hardware question.
Where the country differences can live instead
The alternative is not that the rules get simpler. It is that fewer of them are baked into the box.
A charger that speaks OCPP and does what the backend tells it can be the same charger in five countries, with the country-specific behaviour configured above it: the load limits, the tariff logic, the reporting, the settlement. That turns a market entry from a hardware timeline into a configuration one, and it means a rule change is a change in software rather than a swap of installed equipment.
This is also why a site that already has mixed hardware is not a problem to be solved. On Plugchoice the management layer runs across brands over OCPP, so a Zaptec, an Alfen and something else on the same car park are managed as one site under one set of rules.
None of this is a criticism of Zaptec's quarter, which is a good one by any reading. It is the shape of the constraint their own board wrote down, and it applies to every maker selling into more than one country.
What to watch next
A backlog of 1.1 BNOK against a 506 MNOK quarter says the demand is booked rather than hoped for. The open questions are whether Germany holds its rate once the Sonepar channel is fully loaded, and whether France recovers now that the regulatory adaptation work is behind it. Both get answered in the Q3 numbers.
Sources: Zaptec ASA, Second quarter 2026 financial results and the Q2 2026 report, Oslo Bors, August 19, 2026.