Plugchoice
Uutiset
Uutiset//4 min read

Enovates restarts as Enovates Group, backed by Koolen Industries

Six weeks after it went bankrupt, the Belgian charger maker Enovates has a second life: a restart as Enovates Group, backed by Booking.com founder Kees Koolen. Here is what the revival changes for the chargers already in the field, what it does not guarantee, and how OCPP keeps them yours either way.

When Enovates went bankrupt at the start of June, we treated it as a continuity risk and wrote about what installers, CPOs and operators should do about their chargers. Six weeks on, the story has turned. The Belgian charger maker is getting a second life.

Reporting from Dutch and Belgian trade press says Enovates has made a doorstart and continues as Enovates Group, after cleantech investor Kees Koolen, one of the founders of Booking.com, stepped in to rescue the bankrupt company. Founder Bart Vereecke stays involved, and the stated aim of the restart is to keep the existing infrastructure running and honour existing contracts.

That is genuinely good news for a lot of chargers. It is also not the end of the story, and if you manage Enovates hardware it changes less about what you should do than it might seem.

From bankruptcy to a restart

The fall was quick. Enovates was a serious business-to-business charger maker, not a webshop brand, until Shell Recharge stepped back from the market. Shell reportedly accounted for around half of Enovates' revenue, and once it left, parent company Connect Group withdrew its support and the company went bankrupt around the start of June.

The rescue is what is new. Rather than a wind-down, Enovates continues under new backing as Enovates Group, with Koolen Industries behind it. For a hardware maker with a large field base, a rescue that keeps the lights on matters more than most acquisitions: it is the difference between contracts being served and a fleet being orphaned.

Why an Enovates wobble reaches beyond Belgium

Most people with an Enovates charger do not know they have one. Enovates sold business-to-business and its hardware reached drivers under other names: Shell Recharge Advanced units, NewMotion Home Advanced boxes, TotalEnergies home chargers, and distributor lines such as Lanova, deployed by operators like EnergyVision. New Mobility reports more than 300,000 Enovates charge points across Europe, at customers including TotalEnergies and Interparking.

So "is Enovates going to be fine" is not a Belgian question. It is a question for a large number of chargers that do not say Enovates on the front.

A restart is not a reset

A rescue buys time. It does not reset the clock to before the bankruptcy.

What a restart like this typically secures is that the company keeps operating and that contracts and infrastructure are meant to be maintained. What it does not automatically restore, on day one, is the full supply chain around the product: spare-part availability, a firmware and security-update roadmap, warranty handling and support response times all take a while to settle after a bankruptcy, and a rescued company is still finding its feet. Because Enovates has always been white-label, your actual relationship may run through a reseller or a brand rather than through Enovates directly, which is one more link that has to hold.

None of that is a reason to panic. It is a reason to treat the restart as breathing room rather than an all-clear, which is the same lesson we drew when the bankruptcy first hit, and when a backend changed direction and left chargers trapped.

Keeping Enovates chargers under your control

Here is the part that does not depend on how the restart goes. What keeps a charger manageable is OCPP access, not the manufacturer's balance sheet. An Enovates charger with a reachable OCPP connection can be pointed at Plugchoice: there is a dedicated Enovates connection guide, and the platform is built for OCPP chargers across brands.

The piece that makes this low-risk is the Plugchoice OCPP Proxy. It sits between the charger and the platforms, so you can route an Enovates charger to Plugchoice alongside or instead of its current backend without a site visit or re-commissioning. If the restart goes well, you have lost nothing. If it wobbles again, you already hold the control layer. For installers and charge point operators, that means the charger layer stays yours regardless of what happens two levels up the supply chain.

It is free to start, with charger management, the web portal, the app and the OCPP Proxy included. If you run a larger Enovates fleet, talk to Plugchoice before you need to.

Sources

Jatka lukemista

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