Kwang Yang Motor Co (光陽工業) is expanding its electric scooter business to Indonesia, its second market in Southeast Asia after India, with an investment of US$30 million in Grab Holdings Inc's two-wheel sharing service provider.
Venture capital fund KYMCO Capital (金庫資本), which counts the Kaohsiung-based Kwang Yang as a major investor, yesterday said that it has secured an unspecified share of Grab’s new electric two-wheeler sharing service provider, GrabWheels, after eight months of talks.
The venture capital fund participated in Grab’s newest round of financing by investing US$6 million, along with other investors such as Microsoft Corp, Softbank Group Corp and Toyota Motor Corp.
“Grab is a start-up with great growth potential, as it has developed into the biggest ride-hailing service provider in Southeast Asia in a short period of time. The company has garnered 2 million drivers to offer ride-hailing service in eight countries in the region,” KYMCO Capital managing partner Gary Ting (丁學文) told a media briefing in Taipei.
This year, the electric scooter-sharing market would experience explosive growth, Ting said.
The scooter-sharing market in Southeast Asia has expanded to US$12.7 billion and the market is to grow to US$40 billion by 2025, thanks to soaring demand from the food delivery sector, Ting said, citing forecasts by Google and Temasek Holdings Pte.
Southeast Asia is one of the world’s fastest-growing electric scooter markets, given that it has 250 million scooters, 110 million of whom are from Indonesia, said GrabWheels, which was launched in November 2018.
With the partnership with KYMCO, GrabWheels found the last piece it needed to build a supply chain to tap into Southeast Asia’s electric-scooter market, Chris Yeo, head of Grab Ventures and New Platform Business, said in a joint statement.
GrabWheels said that it is soon to deploy electric scooters produced by Kwang Yang in Indonesia and Singapore, and plans to expand to the rest of the region’s 11 nations.
The company would also adopt Kwang Yang’s battery charging system, called Ionex, and its fleet managing solutions, it said.
GrabWheels operates a fleet of 4,000 scooters and expects the number to more than triple to 15,000 by the end of this year, the company said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to