How Spiro Plans To Outrun Its Single Biggest Foe In Africa’s EV Race

As the race to electrify Africa’s transport sector heats up, and more so on two wheels than more, Spiro is positioning itself as one of the continent’s leading electric motorbike companies. But while the company’s growth has been impressive—placing over 20,000 electric bikes on roads across Benin, Togo, Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria in three years—the biggest challenge it faces isn’t other EV companies. 

The formidable opponent? It’s the entrenched dominance of gasoline-powered motorcycles, around 25 million of them,  which still make up the vast majority of Africa’s two-wheeler market, as Kaushik Burman, Spiro’s CEO, points out.

As he told WT, gasoline-powered bikes represent the company’s biggest hurdle. “We don’t see other EV players as our competition,” Burman emphasised in an interview, welcoming the efforts of rivals such as Ampersand, Roam, and Dodai, among others. “It’s the gas-powered motorcycles that remain our biggest challenge.”

Despite the promise o...