K-Lataus is the electric vehicle charging network owned by K-Auto, the car-trade arm of Kesko company – a massive Finnish retailer working across three main business areas: grocery trade, hardware and technical trade stores and car trade. The company has been leveraging that to build a recharging network located primarily in Kesko’s own grocery and hardware stores.
“Our idea is that, especially in supermarkets and hypermarkets, we have huge parking areas where people stop for 30, 40 or 50 minutes at a time, and that is a pretty good length of time to charge your EV,” explains Iiro Määttänen, Director of the K-Lataus network.
The network has seen millions invested in its expansion over the last couple of years. By 2021 K-Lataus offered 99 charging locations. By 2022 that had more than doubled to 200 charging locations, and last year the company had 285 charging locations. And the network continues to grow.
“Our basic strategy is to charge your EV when you are parked anyway,” Määttänen says.
This alone is a differentiator that points to an important new direction for the roll-out of electric vehicle infrastructure. However, it is not the only field that K-Lataus is competing in.
“Compared to some of our competitors, especially in Europe, we offer high power and DC charging from the outset,” Määttänen tells us. “We offer a level of charging that can serve EVs, not just hybrids.”
Today, K-Lataus’s network has been developed across 300 locations, offering 1,700 charging points to the nation of Finland, offering a maximum of 400kW for electric vehicles with its biggest site consisting of 18 charging points. Using charging technology for example from Kempower, the K-Lataus network can offer extremely high reliability and dynamic power distribution to improve charging availability. The charger design is driven with the experience of the user in mind, boasting features such as cable management and user-friendly charging displays.
“We are offering a lot of power and a lot of parking places for EV drivers next to high-traffic A roads,” says Määttänen.
Widening the Net
The firm has already achieved a lot, but there is still so much more to do if a full transition to electric vehicles is going to be possible.
“This area of business is rapidly developing. Things are moving fast, and customer demand is growing,” Määttänen says. “The number of EVs on the road has been growing really fast over the last few years. We can offer a charging service for the customers that need it, but we cannot yet say that the network is ready. We have to be continuously developing the network, finding the places to make the expansions and get more charging in place.”
K-Lataus wants to spread its network even wider to serve locations that are further afield in places such as Lapland. However, the development of the network is not just about how many cars and locations it can serve, it is also about how it treats the customers across different markets.
“One of the ways we are developing the network is focusing on our service and how we treat company car drivers,” Määttänen tells us. “We are asking what we can do for leasing companies and how we can make the service better on that side.”
A Lean Green Team
It is a huge operation, but while K-Lataus is part of the large Kesko Group, K-Lataus itself is a relatively small team.
“We have quite a lean organisation. We are a small team backed up by the huge support from the locations we operate in,” Määttänen points out.
That team is supported by K-Lataus’s business partners and other departments within K Autos, and from there it has gone on to build in the essential skills and capabilities it needs as it goes.
“We have built the key elements into our own team,” Määttänen says. “We look to recruit professionals who are willing to develop themselves. We want people who have a passion for developing new solutions for the different strands of EV drivers.”
Going to the Customers
With that team assembled, the K-Lataus network is led by a single guiding principle – it goes where the customers already are. This not only makes it easy for customers to use, but also helps reduce the network’s environmental footprint by installing its chargers in existing car parks rather than building on greenfield sites.
“We are building the chargers into the places that the customers are coming to anyway and already have parking places,” says Määttänen. “We’re not building from scratch on greenfield, and that is important for the retail companies going into the charging business.”
As a joint project with Kesko’s grocery store business, K-Lataus has access to the charging venues that customers need.
“That’s the key thing,” Määttänen emphasises. “We offer the charging venues in the locations that make the transformation possible from gasoline to EVs. We want K-Auto to be one of the biggest EV importers in Finland, and we are helping to build the public charging networks that are needed for the EV change.”
Määttänen is optimistic about how much help K-Lataus can offer to drive that transformation, with the network offering good coverage for the Finnish map while demand continues to grow.
“High customer-flow locations need more charging capacity, more cables, and more charging places for EV drivers. So, we are expanding those,” he says. “The next step in our expansion planning is to look at growing those high-flow locations.”
But as well as continuing to grow the network’s reach and capacity, Määttänen is also looking at the company’s internal operations on the grocery store side of the business.
“We want to go further into offering electric solutions as part of our Group sustainability program, and we are offering internal solutions there,” he says.
