Evnex founder and CEO Ed Harvey outside his firm's Christchurch headquarters and manufacturing plant. Photo / Chris Keall
Christchurch’s Evnex releases a home EV charger for the cost-of-living-crisis era. Amazon’s cloud division, AWS, reveals its latest NZ financials. Alexa gets AI smarts. DOGE “cuts” hit Wellington man Peter Griffin.
Evnex’s brag line has always been that it’s the maker of the world’s slimmest home EV chargers.
Now it’s also a contender for those feeling the cost-of-living pinch, its founder Ed Harvey says.
The Christchurch firm’s new E2 Core smart charger is on a $999 launch special, putting it in play in the crowded sub-$1000 bracket. (Installation can double the price, depending on where your switchboard is located and other factors. The same games for all brands, so remember to factor this if you’re shopping around for a home charger.)
The E2 Core is a 7-watt model, meaning you can add around 50km of range for every hour your EV (electric vehicle) is plugged in (the exact amount will vary by make and model; most EVs are supported).
There’s an app and Wi-Fi support, and the ability to automatically delay charging until off-peak rates kick in. Harvey says the emphasis is on building a system that will appeal to the second wave of EV buyers, who’re often less technical than the early adopters.
An E2 Plus model ($1299) adds frills, including support for Tesla features.
Higher up the Evnex food chain, the E7 ($2065) offers 11W charging for around 75km of range per hour or 22W for about 120km of range for every hour your EV is plugged in.
Harvey founded Evnex in Christchurch in 2014, after he converted his 1997 Honda Accord to electric power as a university project. The company is now New Zealand’s biggest manufacturer of EV chargers and software, and has recently expanded into Australia in 2023.
He says Evnex has sold 8000 chargers over its lifetime and is set to double that amount over the next 18 months.
Manufacturing will stay in Christchurch, and Evnex will stick to incorporating recycled materials and using printed circuit boards made by another Christchurch company, GPC Electronics.
Harvey is loyal to the city. And he adds, candidly, that his firm just doesn’t have the scale to make it worth retooling for a Chinese plant. Regardless, “It only takes 20 minutes to assemble one of our chargers,” he says. “That’s pretty efficient.”
Beyond Made in NZ and environmental appeal, Evnex is a charging partner for several new-vehicle brands including Polstar, Volkswagen, Volvo, Skoda, Cupra, Subaru and LDV in New Zealand. So for example Polestar (sold by Giltrap Group) pushes the Evnex chargers on its website and offers its buyers special pricing.
Harvey spoke to the Herald from Sydney, where he’s now spending a lot of his time. There are five reasons.
Despite some trimming, Australia still offers incentives for buying an EV (which vary by state). And there are no road user charges for EV owners (Victoria tried, but had its effort struck down by the state’s High Court, which ruled it unconstitutional).
Australian private equity firm Adamantem took a 33% stake in Evnex (and half its board seats) through its $350m Environmental Opportunities Fund (the price was undisclosed; earlier Harvey told the Herald he was looking for around $10m). That made it the largest single shareholder in Evnex ahead of Harvey, and earlier backers Movac and Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 – who supported a $3m seed round in 2021 – which both hold small stakes.
If Adamantem’s name sounds familiar, it’s the firm that last year had a tilt at The Warehouse Group. It has investments in a range of businesses in New Zealand and Australia, including the sausage and bacon business Hellers, where it took control for $213m in 2018. It also owns EdgeZero (low-voltage grid monitoring) and electrical products maker Legend Corp.
Harvey says that in Australia, this is even more so the case, with drivers now getting paid to charge in the middle of the day due to too much solar energy being generated.
Australia has much higher home solar uptake, making it more fertile ground for Evnex’s more expensive solar-supporting X series.
The Lucky Country is being bombed with new Chinese brands as Biden-era US tariffs – now being expanded by Trump II – push stock Dowunder (a phenomenon we’re also seeing, to a slightly lesser degree, on this side of the ditch).
And lastly and definitely not leastly: “Cost of living is still an issue in Australia, but the economy is doing comparatively better than New Zealand. People probably aren’t tightening their belts quite as much,” Harvey says.
The National-led Government has pledged to expand the current public charger network to 10,000 points by 2030, although details are still fuzzy.
Would Harvey like to see some of that funding go to smart home chargers? He keeps his answer broad strokes.
“We’d like to see some more incentives for EVs in New Zealand. We think the current Government is under-doing it a bit,” Harvey says.
He would also like to see regulatory changes for the likes of pre-wiring for chargers in new apartment blocks (retrofits can be very expensive) and to make it easier – or simply possible – for kerbside solutions for townhouse dwellers and others without garages.
“The less oil we require, the more we end up supporting our own state-owned electricity generators,” Harvey adds.
“So I think it will be really great to see the National Party consider a little bit more about their policy because we import roughly $3 billion worth of fuel a year. And the more electric vehicles we have, the less reliant we are on that.”
Amazon Web Services New Zealand made a net profit of $23.3m on net sales that rose 11% to $425.7m for the 12 months to December 31, 2024, according to accounts filed with the Companies Office on Friday.
In 2023, AWS NZ made a net loss of $2.8m on net sales of $384.6m.
The firm – 100% owned by its US parent Amazon.com Inc – made a $4.9m provision for income tax for 2024 vs $1.8m in 2023.
Cash and equivalents increased to $105.7m from $57.0m.
Payroll costs fell to $7.1m from $7.4m in 2023.
Amazon bought land for its supermassive new Auckland data centre – construction has just kicked off at Westgate – via a separate vehicle created for the project, AWS Data Services, which has yet to file public accounts.
In revenue terms, AWS is easily the global market leader in cloud services.
Earlier this month, Amazon said AWS’ global revenue increased 19% to $28.79 billion in the fourth quarter as it continued to ride the AI boom. “Virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it,” Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said.
The local operation’s results were also informed by changes in inhouse expenses, with costs incurred from related party transactions swinging in AWS NZ’s favour.
AWS declined an interview over its financials, in keeping with the usual approach from its Big Tech peers.
Notes with AWS’s accounts note that New Zealand passed legislation last year to support the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit-Shifting (BEPS) initiative. Specificiallly, BEPS’ “Pillar Two” - that is, a global minimum corporate tax of 15%.
The legislation came into effect on January 1. The returning President Donald Trump has pledged to dismantle Pillar Two - and even signed an executive order asking Federal agencies to “explore” retaliatory measures.
Regardless, tax experts told the Herald that New Zealand would get little-to-no extra revenue from Pillar Two, given any top-up tax paid to reach the 15% minimum will be paid in a Big Tech firm’s home country.
Amazon has previewed a conversational AI, dubbed Alexa+, for its Echo line of smart displays and screens and Fire TV - which spans from Amazon’s own gadgets to a new alliance with Panasonic to power its latest smart TVs.
Head of devices Panos Panay fired off commands with natural phrasing: “Alexa, what’s that song that Bradley Cooper sings and it’s like a duet?” A speaker began playing “Shallow.”
He followed up with: “Alexa, can you jump to the scene in the movie?” A nearby Fire TV opened the film “A Star Is Born,” right to the climactic scene.
New Alexa Routines infer what you mean without an explicit request, like adjusting the temperature on your smart thermostat when you say you’re cold, or dimming the lights when you say it’s too bright, Panay said.
You could already chat with Alexa, but now it looks smoother and easier. Notably, Panay’s demos were all live.
Amazon says the new features will work with its own services plus those from the likes of GrubHub, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Whole Foods Market (the supermarket chain owned by Amazon), Uber, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max and smart home devices from companies like Philips Hue in the US - where Alexa+ will launch from March at US$19.99 per month, or free for subscribers to the US$14.99 per month Amazon Prime (which in the US is a more all-embracing service that includes deliveries).
The no-extra cost touch will be appreciated by those annoyed by the approach taken by rivals (read: Tech Insider: Google follows Microsoft in raising prices as it bundles AI).
Amazon plans to expand Alexa+ beyond the US but there’s no timeline at this point. The firm says it will supply more details on the local experience and pricing closer to its NZ launch.
The launch was a bit delayed. Amazon was initially shaping up for an upgrade in late 2023, during the first wave of LLM hype around ChatGPT. But it still has breathing space. Apple has yet to add Apple Intelligence to its HomePods, while Google’s Gemini is still only available to a subset of its smart speaker users under a preview programme launched in December.
The Elon Musk-driven Department of Government Efficiency has been lauded by some for employing a tech industry-style “move fast and break things” model.
But according to a New York Times audit, its errors are piling up.
DOGE has claimed US$65b in savings but has only itemised US$10b - and with that US10b there have been a number of gross exaggerations.
In one case, DOGE listed a contract worth US$8 million as actually being worth US$8 billion. In another, it mistakenly counted the same US$655 million contract three times. In a third, it claimed it had saved $149 million by canceling a contract for three administrative assistants at the National Institutes of Health worth about $1.4 million.
And then there’s a slew of contracts “cancelled” that actually expired years ago.
For example, “While George W. Bush was president, the US Coast Guard signed a contract to get administrative help from a company in Northern Virginia. It paid $144,000, and the contract was completed by June 30, 2005,” the Times says.
“Twenty years passed. Presidents came and went.
“Last week, Elon Musk’s restructuring team, called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, said it had just canceled the long-dead Coast Guard contract — and in doing so, saved U.S. taxpayers $53.7 million.
There have been local examples, too. Wellington-based tech commentator Peter Griffin posted:
“I got the following email from the US State Department over the weekend informing me that a grant a NZ charity I’m involved in was given by the State Department is being terminated.”
Griffin added, “But the grant ended years ago and the money is already spent. I’d say a lot of cancelled programmes and funding is actually tidying up an out-of-date database.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
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