The Profitability Booster Behind High-Performing Charge Point Operators

On a quiet Wednesday morning, Kiran Mehta, a senior manager of a charging point operator in Bengaluru, was sipping on his usual coffee. He opened his laptop to check how his newest EV station was doing. The launch had gone smoothly, the location looked promising, and the numbers from the first weekend were solid. He was happy. But his smile faded when he saw a string of angry comments and one-star reviews: “Charger not working,” “Wasted my time,” “Worst experience.” Within minutes, he had a technician en-route, yet the bigger question lingered: how much business had vanished in those silent hours of charger downtime?

EV charging profitability is directly connected to uptime

In the EV charging business, uptime directly decides how much money a charging network actually makes. When an EV charger stays online, the revenue adds up quietly in the background. But the moment a charger goes down, the losses begin just as quietly, often long before anyone notices what’s happening. Even a small dip, say 2%, may look harmless on paper, yet it can drain a significant chunk of revenue when spread across an expanding network. And as more chargers get added, staying on top of uptime becomes far more complicated. Teams can’t rely on manual inspections or scattered logs anymore; by the time an issue is spotted, the damage is already done.

What’s happening globally reinforces this. The US now expects at least 97% uptime for EV chargers under the NEVI program. The UK is pushing for even higher reliability at 99%, backed by real-time visibility for users. India, too, is tightening its framework by requiring public chargers to share live status data through open APIs on the EV Yatra platform. Different regions may be moving at different speeds, but the direction is unmistakable: high uptime is becoming a baseline requirement. It’s now tied closely to compliance, customer trust, and the ability to stay competitive as the charging market matures.

Delayed detection of downtime often drains profitability

Without real-time monitoring, CPOs are at the risk of discovering problems only after they’ve affected revenue significantly and/or frustrated customers. This reactive approach makes it hard to maintain consistency across sites and leaves teams constantly playing catch-up. As a result, a few common challenges show up again and again.

4 Pain points keep recurring

• EV chargers remain offline for hours or even days without being noticed.

• Issues surface only when drivers escalate complaints, and customer trust is already eroded.

• Technicians are dispatched without diagnostic clarity, leading to trial-and-error fixes that need more time and money.

• Disconnected tools across OEMs cause visibility gaps and generate operational blind spots.  

This becomes a bigger problem while working on scale  

While a few outages may feel manageable in a small footprint, the picture changes drastically as a network grows. Downtime compounds silently. Undetected faults across dozens of chargers can turn into significant operational and financial stress.

Here’s an example of what kind of business impact this can have.

Let’s say you run an EV charging station with 100 chargers, at a margin of ₹4 per unit of power (kWh). Let’s assume each EV is using 20kWh to charge (on the lower end), and each EV charger has 4 such charging sessions per day.

Your monthly financials:

• 100 chargers*4 rupees margin per unit* 20 units (kWh) * 4 sessions per day = ₹32,000  

• ₹32,000 x 30 days = ₹9,60,000 per month

• Just 5% downtime = (100%-5%) x 100 chargers × 4 rupees margin per unit x 20 units × 4 sessions/day x 30 days = ₹9,12,000 per month.

• Loss = ₹9,60,000 - ₹9,12,000 = ₹48,000 per month.

₹48,000 monthly loss is approximately 1.5 days of revenue lost from your monthly business and amounts to nearly ₹5.8 lakh annually.

And this is the conservative view. If down time happens to high-utilisation DC fast chargers, the loss per hour can climb even more sharply, because more sessions will be affected. Ultimately, one thing is clear:

This is why a Remote Monitoring System (RMS) becomes such a critical piece of the puzzle. It works like the command centre of the entire network; watching every charger, picking up early signs of trouble, and giving operators the ability to act before small issues snowball into downtime.

RMS reduces downtime by leveraging predictive data

An RMS is essentially a cloud-driven command centre that keeps a charging network stable and predictable. It monitors dozens of parameters, voltage, current, temperature, network health, and instantly flags any abnormal behaviour. With real-time analytics, it identifies patterns that humans might miss, enabling predictive maintenance rather than emergency repairs.

A cooling fan that repeatedly overheats, for instance, can trigger a predictive alert. The operator can replace the component before the charger shuts down and disrupts service. This shift from firefighting to proactive care dramatically increases uptime.

Real-world data shows that a simple remote restart can resolve 50–70% of charger faults. Without RMS, every one of these cases becomes a costly site visit, often involving truck-roll expenses as high as ₹40,000; not to mention hours of downtime. With RMS, these issues are fixed in seconds.

ROI gets improved by addressing these 4 pain points

RMS delivers a measurable financial impact by tackling the core cost and revenue drivers for a CPO. Below is a math-backed breakdown for each lever:

(a) Reduces Downtime to yield more Revenue per Charger

Let’s take the same example as before with the same assumptions:

• 100 chargers

• ₹25 margin per session

• 6 sessions/day

• 365 days/year
  

₹15,18,400 more revenue/year

This gain comes with no extra marketing or capex, purely through increased charger availability.

(b) Leads to fewer site visits which directly reduces opex

Here are a few assumptions:

• Average maintenance cost per site visit = ₹5,000 (site visit costs in the range of ₹3,000 -₹10,000, we are taking the lower end of the range in order to study the impact of RMS even in benign situations)

• Site visits/year (100 chargers):

• Without RMS: 50

• With RMS: 20 (less than 50% deduction assumed as a conservative estimate)
  

Net OPEX savings = ₹1.5 lakh/year

If site repairs cost nearly ₹10,000 (seen for remote DC sites), OPEX savings approach ₹5 lakh/year.

Even if you add the average RMS cost, which is an additional ₹1.2 lakh/year, it’s covered from just the opex savings.

(c) Optimises Asset Performance

A study conducted by ESSL on over 1500 government owned EVs can prolong asset life by 20%, even in early stages. Let’s translate that to an EV charging station.

• Let’s say, capex invested is ₹3 lakh/charger. Thus, capex for 100 chargers = ₹3 lakh x 100 = ₹3 Cr

• Extended lifespan (20% longer life = 1 extra year on 5-year equipment), therefore,  

Deferred depreciation ≈ ₹60L over 6 years instead of 5 = ₹12L/year → ₹2.4L/year saved

(d) Improves Customer Experience

While the impact of this can vary from site to site, even if we take a rather low estimate of 10% higher repeat usage, it translates to 0.4 extra sessions/charger/day.

Margin gain:

100 chargers × 0.4 sessions gained per charger × ₹4 margin X 20 units (kWh) × 365 days

= ₹11.7 lakh/year

These estimates make it clear that after paying for an RMS, the gains are several times the cost. In the above scenario, the return on investment (1.2L) is 15.1L + 1.5L + 11.7L = 28.3L, thanks to uptime revenue, repeat utilization and OPEX savings.

Single dashboard approach provides high visibility

RMS consolidates an entire network onto one intuitive dashboard. Operators can see every charger, from every brand, in every location, without switching between OEM systems.

This unified view enables:

• Real-time fleet-wide monitoring

• Cross-site performance benchmarking

• Data-driven maintenance planning

• Seamless scalability from 10 to 1000 chargers

What used to require multiple teams and siloed tools can now be managed from a single console, by a lean operations team.

RMS is not a cost, it’s a growth lever

RMS should be seen as a strategic investment, not a luxury add-on. It keeps chargers productive, reduces downtime, and strengthens user trust; all of which feed directly into revenue.  

For CPOs aiming to scale profitably in India’s fast-moving EV market, RMS provides the backbone for reliable, compliant, and customer-friendly operations.

Exicom’s HarmonyConnect RMS platform provides real-time monitoring and remote diagnostics to detect issues accurately. Complete visibility of issues is made available to CPOs with a highly analytical dashboard and an alert system that sends notifications, triggers automated commands, and generates tickets for rapid issue resolution. Explore more here.