BP and China’s Didi Chuxing (DiDi) have agreed to form a new joint venture to build electric-vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure in China, the world’s largest market for EVs.

DiDi (www.didiglobal.com) is a leading ‘multi-modal transportation platform’, offering users app-based options that include ride-hailing, ‘automobile solutions sharing’, and other services.

Its platform already has about 550 million users, and around 600,000 EVs are running on it in China where BP has a significant and rapidly growing presence.

The joint venture will develop stand-alone charging hubs to provide EV charging services to DiDi’s drivers and the public. The partners also intend to expand the venture into ‘loyalty and convenience offerings’ (plus other fleet services) in the near future.

Tufan Erginbilgic, BP’s ‘downstream’ chief executive (www.bp.com), said: “As the world’s largest EV market, China offers extraordinary opportunities to develop innovative new businesses at scale, and we see this as the perfect partnership for such a fast-evolving environment.

“The lessons we learn here will help us further expand BP’s advanced mobility business world-wide, helping to drive the energy transition and develop solutions for a low-carbon world.

“Combining BP’s global retail capability,EV charging expertise and experience with DiDi’s unrivalled mobility service platform, our partnership will aggregate demand and provide high-quality, fast and safe charging for DiDi drivers and the public in China.

“DiDi is already converting to electric vehicles and has a very large user base, so we expect to drive high utilisation of charging assets from Day One.”