Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), a leading Taiwan-based electric scooter brand, is to receive the Global Company of the Year Award from Frost & Sullivan.
Gogoro, the only Taiwanese company to have received the award, was chosen based on the California-based research and consulting firm’s analysis of the swappable battery electric scooter market.
Frost & Sullivan said it chose Gogoro because of the success of its Gogoro Network, “an intelligent energy platform that combines the power of connectivity, artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a new generation of swappable refueling that is smart, scalable and continually optimizing itself.”
Photo: Hung Mei-hsiu, Taipei Times
Under the network, the number of Gogoro’s battery swap stations, called GoStations, has grown from 70 in 2015 to almost 2,000 this year, with nearly 360,000 customers using the stations every month, Frost & Sullivan said.
“Gogoro strategically places these stations every 500 meters in places such as malls, convenience stores, parking structures and coffee shops. It has established consumer battery swapping on a mass scale, performing 265,000 battery swaps each day (135 million to date),” Frost & Sullivan said in a statement. “It demonstrates that its business model is viable and practical.”
Gogoro is set to launch similar services in cities outside of Taiwan, Frost & Sullivan research director Vishwas Shankar said.
“As a testament to its success with GoStations, its vehicles and the overall Gogoro Network, the company’s ridership developed their own community, forming multiple forums and networks and becoming ambassadors for climate change and clean energy transportation,” Shankar said.
The model is so successful that China Motor Corp (中華汽車), an automaker which sells electric scooters under the brand eMoving, announced last month that it has joined the Powered By Gogoro Network.
China Motor, which is part of the auto conglomerate Yulon Group (裕隆集團), is the latest company to join the alliance, making eMoving Gogoro’s fifth partner, following Yamaha Motor Co, Aeon Motor Co (宏佳騰), Motive Power Industry Co’s (摩特動力) PGO and Suzuki Motor Corp’s eReady.
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