The National Development Fund (NDF, 國發基金) has agreed to invest US$30 million in electric scooter maker Gogoro Inc (睿能創意) in a bid to help the firm expand its reach to overseas markets, a government official said yesterday.
“Gogoro is not a traditional company that only sells electric scooters. It is an innovative company that provides smart energy solutions and we think the fund should support such a company,” National Development Council Vice Minister Lin Huan (林桓) said by telephone, confirming the NDF’s investment in Gogoro.
More importantly, Gogoro’s vehicles were 100 percent designed and manufactured in Taiwan, which would help drive the business of its supply chains in Taiwan, Lin said.
The Cabinet-level NDF is cooperating with local and foreign venture capital firms to finance local start-ups. According to the investment agreement with Gogoro, the NDF is to take one seat in the company’s board along with a 6.7 percent stake, Lin said.
Gogoro completed its US$130 million fundraising yesterday, with new investors including the state-run fund and Japan’s Panasonic Corp, according to a statement issued by the company.
Citing Gogoro’s US$130 million fundraising proposal, Lin said the company is to spend the fund mainly on expanding its overseas market rather than increasing its production capacity.
“The company has a manufacturing plant in Taoyuan with sufficient production capacity for the time being,” he said. “Gogoro’s next step is to extend its reach to other nation.”
Panasonic is Gogoro smart scooters’ battery pack supplier and the company has become Gogoro’s first strategic partner, the start-up said in the statement, without elaborating the details of the strategic cooperation.
Ruentex Group (潤泰集團) chairman Samuel Yin (尹衍樑) remains the largest investor in Gogoro’s first and second round of fundraisers, the company said.
Ruentex is the operator of RT-Mart (大潤發) hypermarkets in Taiwan and China. Yin’s business interests range from textiles, construction and retail to life insurance.
Gogoro founder and chief executive officer Horace Luke (陸學森) said in the statement that the company has raised US$180 million from investors who shared the same vision as Gogoro.
“Gogoro has sold nearly 2,000 smart scooters and established 89 battery swap stations in Greater Taipei and Taoyuan. Gogoro’s energy network has become the most frequently used battery-swapping system in the world,” Luke said.
The company’s smart scooter shipments jumped 106 percent monthly to 680 electric scooters last month, after the firm cut prices by as much as 23.43 percent and unveiled a cheaper model.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS