Dyson Ltd, famous for making vacuum cleaners, picked Singapore to manufacture its first electric car, pushing ahead with plans to challenge Tesla Inc in the hottest sector of the automotive market.
The closely held British manufacturer yesterday said it will complete the factory by 2020 and stuck to a goal of rolling out its first model by 2021 as part of a ￡2 billion (US$2.6 billion) effort to expand into automobiles.
The choice of Singapore — which does not have a single car-manufacturing plant and is one of the costliest places in the world to buy an automobile — comes as Tesla zeroes in on establishing a factory in China.
The decision is a victory for the city-state, home to the planet’s second-largest container port and a manufacturing hub for high-technology products such as Rolls Royce Holdings PLC aircraft engines.
Dyson is among new contenders entering the race to make electric vehicles, which are gaining market share from gasoline-powered cars.
Besides Tesla, Dyson would compete with global giants, such as Daimler AG, Volkswagen AG and General Motors Co, that are all charging ahead with electric vehicle plans.
Singapore, with fewer than 6 million people, is a minor market itself, but has technology talent and strong intellectual-property (IP) protections, regularly topping regional IP rankings.
Dyson already has a manufacturing hub in Singapore that focuses on digital motors, with the company employing about 1,100 people in the region.
The country also has a free-trade agreement with China, the world’s largest market for electric cars.
While Tesla last week took a step toward building a car plant in Shanghai, Dyson’s founder, James Dyson, has complained about IP theft in China.
China is to remain the top electric-vehicle market at least until 2040, when more than half of all new car sales and one-third of the planet’s fleet — equal to 559 million automobiles — is to be electric, according to a forecast by Bloomberg NEF.
James Dyson said the company’s “center of gravity” has tilted toward Asia, which last year generated almost three quarters of revenue growth.
“The decision of where to make our car is complex, based on supply chains, access to markets,” Dyson chief executive officer Jim Rowan said in a note to staff.
“The availability of the expertise” would help the company achieve its ambitions, he said.
Dyson had considered the UK and various Asian locations for its car facility.
It has extensive manufacturing experience in Malaysia and previously made products in the UK, which might lose some of its allure for global companies with the planned exit from the EU.
Dyson is to build the plant itself rather than subcontract the work out to suppliers.
Tesla has been going through what founder Elon Musk has called “production hell,” followed by “delivery logistics hell,” as the company has been ramping up volumes at its sole car factory in Fremont, California.
Exactly what type of cars Dyson would be producing remains to be revealed.
Construction is still ongoing at its test facility at Hullavington, England.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS