Kwang Yang Motor Co (光陽工業), which sells its products under the brandname KYMCO, yesterday unveiled a new electric sport scooter, dubbed F9, to target eco-conscious riders.
The F9 is the first electric scooter designed by the company from scratch, it said.
The nation’s biggest manufacturer of gas-powered scooters, Kwang Yang ventured into electric scooters about three years ago by remaking its gas-powered “Many” and “Nice” series into electric ones. At the time, the focus was mostly on its battery charging system, called Ionex.
Photo: Lisa Wang, Taipei Times
“KYMCO’s all-new F9 model offers not only urban mobility, but also satisfies riders’ desire for a better steering experience,” company chairman Allen Ko (柯勝峰) told a global conference in Taipei.
The one-seat electric scooter performs better than a 150cc scooter, the company said, adding that most electric scooters sold on the local market are 125cc models, including those from Gogoro Inc (睿能創意).
The F9 is scheduled to hit the market next year, the company said.
Another electric motorcycle model, called RevoNEX, is to enter mass production at a factory in Italy, it added. Kwang Yang unveiled the concept vehicle at the Milan Motorcycle Show last year, targeting the global electric motorcycle market.
Aside from those two high-performance electric two-wheelers, Kwang Yang CEO Ko Chun-ping (柯俊斌) said the company is to roll out new electric scooters for the mainstream market in the near future.
The company also unveiled two new gas-powered motorcycles and one gas-powered scooter.
Thanks to tax incentives and purchase subsidies, Kwang Yang expects the domestic scooter market to rise 12.2 percent year-on-year to hit a 25-year high of 1.01 million units this year.
The COVID-19 outbreak has also stimulated demand, as people try to avoid mass transportation to reduce risks of contracting the virus, the company said.
“Government tax incentives and subsidies are the biggest drivers behind the growth,” Ko said. “Our shipments are capped by limited capacity. This year’s growth has greatly exceeded our expectations.”
As the Environmental Protection Administration is to stop subsidies for gas-powered scooters that meet its Phase 7 emissions standards from January, Ko said that scooter sales are expected to shrink by between 5 and 10 percent to between 900,000 and 950,000 units next year.
Kwang Yang expects its market share to climb to 34 percent this year from last year’s 33.4 percent, with total sales reaching 350,000 units.
Separately, Gogoro yesterday announced that China Motor Corp (中華汽車) is to join the “Powered by Gogoro Network,” making it the fifth member of the network.
Starting next year, China Motor is to offer new electric scooters under the company’s “eMoving” series that are equipped with batteries that riders can either recharge or swap for new ones.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS