Looking to expand into the European electric car market, San Diego’s Beam Global has signed a binding letter of intent to acquire Amiga DOO Kraljevo, a street lighting and energy infrastructure manufacturer based in Serbia.
Beam Global CEO Desmond Wheatley said his company will pay $10 million to acquire Amiga — $7 million in cash and $3 million in Beam Global stock — and expects to complete the transaction in the third quarter of this year.
“This is the best thing I’ve ever done for the company,” Wheatley said Monday via videoconference call from London. “We’re putting the ‘global’ in Beam Global.”
Based in Sorrento Valley, Beam Global specializes in making products and technologies to a transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, or EVs. The company’s best-known product is the EV ARC, a transportable charging station that fits into a conventional parking spot and charges an EV using solar power.
In existence since 1990, Amiga has customers in 16 nations and boasts an employee base of 210, including nearly 60 with engineering backgrounds, who will remain in Serbia should the deal get finalized.
“These guys are just tailor-made for us,” Wheatley said. “They already have a customer book … so we won’t be doing any cold calling. We’ll be going back to all the existing customers that they’ve had so much success (with), and they have a great reputation, and saying, ‘Hey, you’ve been buying a lot stuff from us for many years now. We have renewably energized EV charging products with California technology.’ ”
Beam Global’s EV ARC charges vehicles with an overhead 4.3-kilowatt solar array that generates electricity independent of the grid. On the ground, a 1-inch ballast pad fits into a standard 9-feet-by-8-feet parking space. Charging ports at the top of the pad can charge any EV model.
Though each EV ARC weighs about 10,000 pounds, the structures can be shipped, don’t need special permitting and avoid the expense of digging trenches to run power to the unit.
Ivan Tlacinac, Amiga CEO and owner, said his company has the engineering and operational capabilities to fabricate Beam Global products and a “long list of prospects to market them to.”
“There is a great deal of appetite for EV charging infrastructure, renewable energy and energy security in Europe at the moment,” Tlacinac said in a statement, “and Beam’s products provide all three.” Tlacinac is expected to stay with the company as CEO of what will be called Beam Europe, reporting to Wheatley.
According to the automotive market research company Hedges & Company, there are 405 million cars in the European market, which exceeds the number in North America (351 million) and is second only to Asia (532 million).
The proposed Amiga acquisition will more than double Beam Global’s employee base. The company has a staff of about 100 at its Sorrento Valley headquarters and another 50 at its Chicago-area location that manufactures lithium-ion batteries.
Beam Global stock is traded on NASDAQ under the symbol BEEM. Beam Global closed Friday’s trading day at $9.94 per share, down 44 percent in the past six months. NASDAQ was closed Monday for Juneteenth.
“I have only done this (acquisition) for one reason, and that is because I anticipate that it will have a very beneficial impact on our share price,” Wheatley said. “Perhaps not in the next few days, but certainly in any kind of meaningful time period.”
