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.
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday said it would work with US chipmaker Intel Corp to jointly develop and deploy next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and intelligent computing platforms in a move to capture booming demand for AI computing systems. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), said in a statement that the partnership would combine its global manufacturing scale, system integration expertise and AI data center deployment capabilities with Intel’s strengths in processor architecture, silicon technologies and software ecosystem. The companies said they plan to work on equipment used in AI data centers, including server racks powered by
RSS