Africa has highest potential for electric vehicles – Albin Wilson

 

Africa is no doubt increasing its capacity to transition to cleaner models of transportation. In this interview with Exclusive Africa’s Wale Ameen, Albin Wilson, Chief Product at Roam, Kenya’s leading electric vehicle making company answers questions bordering on Roam’s operational business model, the place of electric motorcycles in Africa’s burgeoning electric vehicle space and more.

 

EA: Your company is arguably one of the few frontline companies in the EV market in Africa. What is Roam’s business model?

So, the first question, what is Roam’s business model? Well, our business model is that we mainly sell electric vehicles. And Roam is basically a company that focuses on designing, developing and deploying electric vehicles for mass transit and public transport applications. So, basically, we focus on electric buses and electric motorcycles in the public transport system. And the reason we do this is because they obviously have the highest utilization rate of all vehicles.

So they’re used all day, every day. And what that means is that we actually have a much higher impact on a global CO2 level as well as a financial level for our end users. Right. Because with our motorcycle, we can basically double the income of a motorcycle driver with our product by lowering the operational cost by almost 76% because of lower maintenance, no fuel costs and a general cheaper way of operating. And then we work with, basically B to B actors.

So we sell to financing companies and larger operations so that they can distribute them to end users.

We designed these from the ground up. So, basically, yes, we’ve engineered. And that engineering is based on a lot of research made here in Nairobi. And we really focused on getting the user centric perspective. So we’ve actually tailored this product with local engineers that have designed and developed basically everything in house.

And then we bring together components from the world to build that bike. So, basically, our batteries obviously come from China because that’s the only option we have right now. And so goes with most of the electronics. And then we try to localize as much as possible because it obviously creates a lot of synergies with job creation and makes our product more accessible and affordable that way. Currently, we operate in Kenya.

EA: What markets does Roam presently operate actively in at the moment?

We are all Nairobi based, so everybody works and operates in Kenya and Kenya only. Every month, there’s 30,000 motorcycles registered. So it’s a very big market for us to operate in and try to meet the demand of this kind of product, which is very exciting.

EA: What has been the uptake level? Can you share them with us in terms of numbers?

What’s the uptake level per market? So right now, we’re just scaling up mass production. And so we have a facility in Nairobi that has a capacity of 50,000 vehicles a year. And so we’re right now in the phase of scaling that up with our partner Mcopa, which we’ve done most of the sales to. So we have a supply agreement with Mcopa for the motorcycles that they then finance to end customers.

And Mcopa is one of the largest financing companies here in East Africa.

So, yeah, that’s a little bit on our sales figures. Unfortunately can’t go out with how many we’ve sold specifically. But the demand levels are huge. And we’ve seen with Mcopa has a potential of 3 million customers that they already have today. And we’ve seen a lot of uptake that people want to use our product and see that it fits into their operations and what they want to do.

EA: What is the ratio of demand of two/three-wheeler to four-wheeler and what is the likelihood of two wheelers taking the lead in Africa’s pool of EVs into the future?

What is the ratio of demand? I think, generally speaking, our ratio is that we see a lot of more two wheelers coming on on the market than our buses.

Obviously, as I said in the beginning, we focus on these two segments because we think the demand is the highest for electric mobility in these segments. And deploying charging infrastructure is much easier for motorcycles and buses, since the buses operate on predefined routes and the motorcycles can be charged out of any outlet where you charge your phone, basically.

And on the prospect of the whole market in the pool in Africa, I think what we see is that potentially electric vehicles might make more sense on the African continent than anywhere else in the world just because of the access to renewable energy.

 

EA: What challenges has your company faced since its inception in the development of EVs and how have you tried mitigating them?

Here in Kenya, we have 86% renewable energy production already today, and fuel prices are going up as we speak. And so those two drivers, I think, will make EV adoption much, much higher here than anywhere else. And the acceptance of new products and things that make more sense for this market just are much, much quicker. And I think the challenges that we face, it’s always hard building things that are new and trying to scale them. And I think, you know, that’s what kind of protects us in in many ways of competition coming into this space, because it’s hard operating in Nairobi, it’s harder to build things.

Supply chain is more difficult here. And I think those things are challenging, but we’ve managed to overcome them and now are on the way of starting a mass production facility, which really shows how far we come in the very short time. Basically deploying a completely new product in less than two years, which is very exciting. So, yeah, I think that’s mostly answers to your questions. Let me know if you want me to elaborate on something.