Meet the new Mobility Rising index!

From the newsletter

Today we introduce our monthly index for the mobility sector. It shows whether the situation in the sector has improved or worsened in the past month and by how much. This is measured by the change in five key areas: Funding, capacity, pricing, staffing and policy. Data is drawn from public sources.

• We also include a ranking of African countries based on data in five separate categories in the past three months: Projects (number and cumulative size), policy (number and impact), funding (number and size and type), events (number), employment (number of jobs advertised, number of top ten companies in the sector).

• Furthermore, we include a ranking of companies in Africa's EV sector. This is based on the conviction that people are the single best indicator for how well a company is doing. Hence we rank companies by people metrics: Size (number of staff, number of sales staff, number of country locations with 3+ staff), growth (increase in staff, increase in number of sales staff) and maturity (experience, tenure, number of top degrees).

More details

• In our Mobility Rising Index, Kenya topped Africa’s mobility sector, driven by a high number of EV jobs and events hosted over the last three months. It was followed by Egypt and South Africa who came second and third respectively. The duo shone due to the number of electric mobility jobs they have created during the period, as well as enabling policies that support the growth of the sector.

• Other leading countries in our ranking are Ghana and Uganda, the latter of which has been picked by Spiro to host a 50,000-capacity electric motorcycle factory. It will be the continent’s first automatic electric motorcycle manufacturing factory. 

• What is exciting about the sector in Africa is that foreign companies have not been left to dominate, as local firms are giving their own to grab market share. In our Index, US giant Tesla emerged as the top EV company in Africa. While Tesla does not sell its vehicles directly to Africa, it has numerous projects on the continent, including charging station installations and battery energy storage systems.

• Spiro, Africa’s leading electric motorcycle company, is also making waves and spreading quickly across the continent. Motorcycles are the most sold EVs in Africa, and the firm, owned by Dubai-based investment group Equitane, is set to play an even larger role beyond the six countries it currently operates in.

• Other top electric mobility companies include Nigerian EV financing startup Max and China’s BYD, which is revolutionising the sector globally having introduced the continent’s cheapest EV starting in Morocco after which it will launch in South Africa.  

• Overall, our index shows that Africa’s electric mobility sector is growing at a break-neck speed, buoyed by significant inflow of capital from around the world and influx of imported vehicles and components, mainly from China. 

• It is to little surprise then that smart investors are taking notice, and are creating new manufacturing and assembly lines across the continent to produce thousands of EVs to meet the growing demand. The icing on the cake is that with this growth comes much-needed green jobs in a continent where unemployment is the highest in the world.