Blink Charging at H.C. Wainwright: Strategic Shifts and Challenges

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Blink Charging Co (NASDAQ:BLNK) presented at the H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference. The company highlighted its strategic shifts towards profitability amid a mixed financial backdrop. Despite a revenue dip in 2024, Blink Charging’s focus on restructuring and operational efficiency marks a promising yet challenging path forward.

Key Takeaways

• Blink Charging reported a 38% revenue increase from Q1 to Q2 2025, reaching $28.7 million.
• The company is prioritizing a shift towards the owner-operator model for long-term growth.
• Significant management changes include new hires in sales, finance, and technology.
• A 22% reduction in compensation expenses and $8 million in operating expense cuts were achieved in Q2.
• Blink plans to expand its DC fast charging network and introduce crypto payments by year-end.

Financial Results

Blink Charging experienced a notable revenue increase of 38% from Q1 to Q2 2025, totaling $28.7 million. However, the year-over-year comparison showed a decline from 2023’s peak of $140 million to $120 million in 2024. Gross margins in Q2 were 7.3%, affected by $6.4 million in non-cash charges, though the non-GAAP margin was approximately 30%. Service revenues hit a record $11.8 million, marking a 46% increase year-over-year, while network fees rose to $3 million, a 55% increase.

Operational Updates

The company is actively restructuring its management team, with key hires including Chris Carr as Head of Sales, Michael Berkovich as CFO, and Harmit Singh as CTO following the acquisition of Singh’s company, Symmetric. Blink is focusing on expanding its DC fast charging capabilities, with current DC fast chargers at 250 out of 7,000 stations. The acquisition of Symmetric is expected to accelerate the launch of cost-effective chargers for apartment buildings and fleets.

Future Outlook

Blink Charging’s primary focus is on achieving profitability. The company aims to reduce operating expenses while maintaining growth. Capital expenditure will prioritize the expansion of the DC fast charging network. Additionally, Blink is exploring financial structures like the SPV with Axel Trova for projects under the UK government’s Levi program and plans to replicate similar models in the US.

For a detailed review, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference:

Operator: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining H. C. Wainwright’s twenty seventh annual investment conference. On behalf of H. C.

Wainwright, it’s our pleasure to introduce Mike from Blink.

Mike Battaglia, President and CEO, Blink Charging: Great. Thank you very much, and thanks everybody for attending today. My name is Mike Battaglia. I’m the president and CEO of Blink Charging. And today, I’d like to provide a bit of an update on the company, where we are currently, where we see ourselves going in the probably short to medium term environment.

So before we jump in, I will start with the safe harbor statement. I promise I will not read it. I will trust that you will either scan it and or look it up afterwards. And and then secondly, the risk factors of the company. And, you know, we are still, for all intents and purposes, an early stage growth company and probably appropriately fall into that categorization.

Alright. So let’s talk a little bit about Blink. We’re not a new company. The company has actually been around since 02/2009. From 2009 up until 2019, the company generated very little revenue.

So as an example, in 2019, the company generated about $2,700,000 in revenue. By 2023, we had hit our high point at a 140,000,000. So we really had tremendous growth between, call it, 2019 and and 2023. 2024 saw a little bit of a retraction down to about 120,000,000 in revenue. And then I I will talk about, in a moment, 2025, how we began the year, where we are currently, and, where we see things going.

So first of all, Blink is an EV infrastructure company, and we go to market, multiple ways. Number one, we sell EV charging hardware and software services to customers across vertical markets. So things like automotive dealers, municipalities, parking garages, electrical distributors. So if you’re familiar with large national electrical distributors like Graybar or Rexel, companies like that are our partners of Blink, and we sell both level two and DC fast charging hardware, through those channels. Secondly, we support, and what that means is that we manage charging stations.

So if someone were to purchase a charging station from Blink, we offer the software and services that layer on top of those stations, and we generate revenue, largely on a subscription basis for things, like software a cloud based software network services. Then the third piece of the business, which is really what we feel the most valuable piece of the business, is that we own and operate charging stations. So currently, about 65% of our revenue is generated from selling hardware and associated services, and about 35% comes from owning and operating charging stations. We currently own and operate about 7,000 charging stations globally. That’s principally within The United States as well as The UK and Belgium.

So those are our our our two strongest markets within Europe. Now that sixty five thirty five split that I talked about, over the medium to long term, we would like to see that completely flip. The value of the business is in the owner operator model. It is within the recurring revenues that occur from consumers using publicly accessible charging stations where they, we like to say, live, work, and play. So we don’t do much in the consumer space.

So don’t think of Blink as somebody that provides a bunch of charging stations to, garages, like somebody’s personal garage, let’s say. But a nuance to that is that we do do quite a bit, for instance, in the multifamily apartment building space. Okay? So that’s that’s how we think of how we think of the home market. We are currently the third largest EV charging network in The United States.

So you’ve probably heard of companies like Tesla, perhaps ChargePoint. So we are third behind those two companies, and that is according to the US Department of Energy. So that encompasses both what we call AC level two charging stations as well as DC fast charging stations. So as those stations are connected to a publicly accessible network or semi public network, that gets counted in that number. And then as I mentioned, we have a significant presence in Europe as well.

So we have international diversification within the organization. Oh, there we go. Oh, okay. No. Let’s try it one more time.

Got a bit of a lag. Can you guys advance me? Keep going. Right here. Thanks.

So we often get asked, what’s your target market for EV charging? And some in some ways, it’s a difficult question to answer because there is an expression within the industry of every parking space is an opportunity. So in other words, it can be very vertical agnostic. But there are certainly areas where we play that make up a significant portion of our revenue and where we have a lot of corporate focus. And those are things like fleets.

So the largest contract in the company’s history was with the United States Postal Service, where we provide charging stations and associated network services for their fleets that they’re gonna deploy when they as they electrify across the country. I mentioned multi family, so apartment buildings. I think the statistic is that 30% of all Americans live in an apartment complex. They often don’t have access to charging in those buildings. And we more and more are providing charging hardware and software within those within those facilities.

Hospitality, things like hotels. Commercial is kind of all encompassing, but think of things like shopping centers. Workplace is another big market for us. Government in terms of municipalities. Not necessarily the NEVI program for Blink.

We never really went after the NEVI program in any material way, but we do a lot of business with local municipalities, cities, states. We have multiple state contracts across the country, and we leverage those for for EV charging infrastructure. We are also very strong in the automotive segment. So several of us at Blink come from automotive backgrounds, have spent our our careers within the automotive industry. So if you think about automotive OEMs, whether it be a Ford or General Motors, whoever it might be, they have dealer networks, typically thousands of dealers.

And as they bring electric vehicles to market, they need those dealers to be ready to sell those vehicles. And so they those dealers are installing EV infrastructure. That was a big part of our business in 2023, not so much in ’24. And we see some business continuing into 2025 and actually getting a bit stronger in the second half of the year in that segment. Okay.

So I’ve been with Blink for five and a half years. I took over as president and CEO February 1, technically. It was actually a very measured transition. It was actually announced in July 2024, so there was kind of a nice transitionary period until February until I took the role. Now, when I took the role, there were a few things that I wanted to accomplish.

And number one, it was how to get this company to profitability. There is currently not an EV infrastructure company in The US that is publicly traded that is profitable. And that’s a problem. And it’s a problem not only for us as a company, but it’s obviously a problem for investors. And when investors are looking at Blink and they look at our balance sheet, they look at our track record, our history, they wanna know when we are going to achieve profitability.

So first and foremost, it was how do we get this company to profitability? And I felt like at that point in time, we needed a plan, and to execute that plan, we needed a new management team. So beginning in February, I hired a new head of sales, and his name is Chris Carr. He’s highlighted up on the slide. And what was interesting about the timing of that is that our first quarter in twenty twenty five was our low point.

We did about just over $20,000,000 in revenue. We consider that to be totally unacceptable for not only our historical performance, but also for where we wanted to be as a company and where we needed to be going forward. So Chris came on board again in February. And on the on the first quarter conference call, I talked about our expectation that the second quarter was going to be better than the first quarter, and it was. The second quarter our second quarter revenue was up 38%.

All segments of our business were up double digits, so we delivered on that. I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. The second hire was a new chief financial officer. So Michael Berkovich has extensive experience in turnaround situations, restructuring. He’s made a couple exits successfully with some startup companies, etcetera.

And I had really I had interviewed a number of people for this role and really felt like I found the guy when I had hired Michael Berkovich. And he’s been on board for about sixty days now, and I can tell you I I sleep well at night with Michael Berkovich as our chief financial officer. He is extremely operationally focused. He is relentlessly pursuing cost reductions at the company, and that was a core tenet of what I wanted to accomplish is it was clear that the company needed to reduce its operating expense base. We’ve made progress over the last, you know, eighteen months or so, but not enough.

Not enough and not fast enough. And in the last few months, we have accelerated those efforts, and we have more to go. So Michael Berkovich came on board. Then, similarly, I wanted a fresh set of eyes and thinking within the CTO ranks. And came across a guy named Harmit Singh.

And Harmit is unique. He actually was one of the founders at a company called GreenLots, which was one of the original EV charging software networks that were founded in the industry, grew that. That was acquired by Shell, and he ran all product for Shell Recharge while he was there. And then he left and he actually started his own EV charging company called Symmetric. And as I was interviewing Harmit, I definitely wanted him on board, but the problem was he owned an EV charging company.

And I’ll talk about this a little bit more. But as we peel back the onion on that company, we realized it was a perfect fit for Blink. So in some respects, I got a twofer. We have a new CTO on board who is highly talented, and we were able to absorb Harmeet’s company, into Blink, which, is working out extremely well. So let’s talk about let’s talk a little bit about q two.

So as I mentioned, we did about $20,000,000, in q one. In the second quarter, up 38% sequentially to 28,700,000.0. The year over year comp was still negative. So if we look at the 2024 versus 2025, we were still down a bit if we look at it that way. But what we were really concentrating on is where was the bottom in the business as it relates especially to not just Blink, but also the market in in general had had some difficulties, let’s say, over the last, you know, six, seven months prior to that.

And so we feel like we found that in the first quarter, improved things in the in the second quarter. Now you’ll see the 2,100,000.0 in gross profit and 7.3% gross margins. Blink historically has been between 3035% gross margin. We took some charges in the second quarter, specifically related to obsolete inventory adjustments, accounts receivable write down, write off, things like that, to the tune of about $6,400,000. Again, noncash.

If if you on a non GAAP basis, the margins would have been just about 30%, so within the range of historical numbers. Our service revenues were $11,800,000. That was a record. They continue to increase quarter over quarter at double digit growth rates. So year over year, we were actually up 46%.

Sequentially, from the first quarter to the second quarter, we were up 11%. So sequentially up 11, year over year up 46, and and we’ve had similar type increases in quarters past, and we anticipate a strong performance in that segment growing forward. And that largely includes our owner operator revenue, so as we own and operate charging stations. Network fees made up $3,000,000 in the quarter, up 55% year over year. So again, when someone buys a charging station, if they sign up for the subscription of network services, which enables them to manage their charging stations, It enables them to enable payment at those charging stations.

That is what that $3,000,000 in network revenue entails. And then 49 gigawatt hours went through all Blink networks globally. So that’s the amount of energy that went through those networks in the second quarter, and that was up 66% year over year. So, again, strong growth in terms of energy disbursement. Now this is this is largely what I talked about on the right side as you see the bar graph.

That is our, charging services revenue growing from, you can see, $8,000,000 in 2024, in the ’24, up to 11.8 today. But, again, that segment of the business is what we feel like is the real value at Blink and what needs to grow significantly. So part of the part of the Blink Forward Plan that I mentioned that talked about profitability, one of the key tenants of that is for Blink to grow its DC fast charging network, its owned and operated fast charging network. And if you look at Blink’s portfolio, we have about we have 7,000 stations roughly we own and operate globally, but only 250 of those are DC fast chargers. The rest of them are level two charging stations.

So as we have added DC fast chargers, and we have seen the contribution of revenue and the growth that those have provided, we quickly realized that that is where we want to concentrate our efforts from from this point forward. It doesn’t mean we won’t do level two, we absolutely will. But when when it terms when it comes to CapEx deployment, we’re going to be focusing that CapEx deployment more on the DC fast charging side. 56% year over year growth in charging revenue, you know, again, base, but over 300% revenue growth in our DC fast charging network. We currently have a very large backlog of DC fast charging projects that we could deploy.

But we have we finished the second quarter with $25,000,000 in cash. So we have scaled back on those CapEx deployments until additional capital can be brought into the company that is specifically focused on that. Alright. Now, in terms of operating expense reduction, we are turning over every stone in this company in order to get it to profitability. We, year over year, saw a 22% reduction in compensation expense.

I think we’re gonna see further reductions in that side. We also eliminated $8,000,000 on an annualized basis of operating expenses in the second quarter. Just in that quarter, $8,000,000 on an annualized basis, in operating expense reduction. But this isn’t just about reducing headcount. This is a company that is looking at every single area of the company, turning over every stone to find cost savings, to find efficiencies, and the mantra of the company becoming doing less with more.

We do not think that a lower expense structure is mutually exclusive or dependent, mutually exclusive from growth. We think we can lower operating expenses, become a more efficient organization, and continuing continue to grow our top line. And again, that that is the path to us eventually getting to profitability. One of one of the, you know, interesting recent developments we just announced last week is we are now by the end of the year, we will be accepting crypto payments through the Blink network. So why did we do this?

Well, it was really for a couple of reasons. Number one is we wanna become a company that makes it as easy as possible for a consumer to pay for a charging session on a Blink charger regardless of the method of payment that they use. So obviously common forms of payment are are credit cards or the blank mobile app. But these emerging payments these emerging payment streams, especially within the crypto space are growing. And we wanna be there at the leading edge of that and see that grow over time.

It’s not just gonna be about crypto. It’s gonna be about enabling other payment methods so that it makes that it allows consumers to pay for their charging session however they wanna pay for it. But again, we think this is an interesting development, and this should be live by the end of the year on on the Blink network. Secondly, there was a bit of a I’ll call it a a cloud hanging over Blink, which was that we had a $21,000,000 obligation on our balance sheet stemming from the acquisition of an EV car sharing company called Envoy that we had acquired about two and a half years ago. And this was the the provision of this $21,000,000 was that we could satisfy it either in cash or in stock.

We certainly did not wanna satisfy it in cash, and so we came to an agreement with the former shareholders of Envoy, where 10,000,000 of it is of of stock was issued immediately, and the other 11,000,000 to make up the total 21 was issued in a series of warrants that get triggered at different stock price achievements. So again, above where we are today. So there’s one, I think, at a dollar 40, and then it and then it ratchets up, you know, into the twos, and then ultimately, I think, in in in the 4,000,000 range. So where we had this $21,000,000 obligation, we had 10,000,000 issued immediately, and then 11,000,000 over time in the form of warrants with stock price achievements. Now, this removed that liability from our balance sheet, and Blink is debt free.

So this was a significant development for us, which we were glad to close. I talked a little bit about Ximetric. And on the second quarter call, we were asked quite a bit about Ximetric. And first of all, Symmetric was a small acquisition for Blink. It was a it it it’s really a quite quite a small company.

But what they brought to us in the form of a product is that we were working on a lower cost charger that was specifically designed for apartment buildings, fleets, things like that. And we were we were handling that internally. And that development process was gonna cost money, it was gonna take time, and it was probably a end of year to first quarter launch of that product. And when as I was talking to Harmit, and as we looked at Zymetric, their product was essentially ready to go. So we decided to accelerate that process to bring that mark bring that product to market faster, and it was exactly what we were working on.

And then we could forego those development costs and get to market quicker. And they also brought with them some interesting software capabilities that we believe we can leverage and a very small team. It was 13 people in total, but we got three very, very talented people at leadership levels in Harmit in a woman named Bonnie Data, who is now gonna run global operations for Blink, and Kapil Singhi, who is going to run hardware development for us as well with our teams in India. So the integration has been extremely fast, I think faster than any of us would have ever expected. And and, again, we’re happy we’re happy with the results.

Another thing that we’re working on is an SPV, off balance sheet special purpose vehicle, with a private equity firm in the in The UK called Axel Trova. And this is previously announced. 100 we can actually it it’s set up for at most a £100,000,000. And this is in conjunction with Blink, specifically with the UK government’s Levi program. So the Levi program is similar to The US’s NEVI program, if you’re familiar with it, but the government provides a subsidy to install EV charging stations in municipalities throughout the country.

So the assets or the projects will be built within this SPV with Axle Trova. Blink will manage them, and we will also receive a small revenue share. And we’ve already begun this this process with Axle Trova. And we would like to do more of this type of financial structure in the future here in The United States. So that’s the story at the moment.

A lot of interesting updates, a lot going on in the last six months. Bottom line is we’ve done a lot in the last six months. We still have a lot to do. We finished the second quarter with $25,000,000 in cash. You know, there there we we do we we we anticipate needing more as things go on.

But, again, the company’s focus is to get us to profitability as fast as we can to manage those operating expenses appropriately and to take advantage of the market that we see as significant in front of us. So I’m happy to take

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