Kwang Yang Motor Co (光陽工業), which has been selling gasoline-powered scooters for more than half a century under the name KYMCO, is reshaping its brand image by adopting a second brand name, Ionex, for its electric scooter business as it moves to challenge market leader Gogoro Inc (睿能創意).
Kwang Yang sait it wanted to change consumers’ mindset about the company by creating an independent sales team to sell its electric two-wheelers. Ionex Taiwan Co (台灣光捷), a fully owned subsidiary, is tasked with crafting a new marketing strategy and building additional sales channels.
Kwang Yang in December 2019 boosted the paid-in capital of Ionex to NT$300 million (US$10.51 million) from NT$15 million, Ministry of Economic Affairs data showed.
Photo: Yang Ya-min, Taipei Times
Prior to this year, Kwang Yang’s electric scooters were sold at its existing sales outlets, alongside its gasoline-powered scooters, since their debut three years ago.
“We have to compete with a strong rival in the home market. Kwang Yang has long been the nation’s biggest maker of gasoline-powered scooters. That brand image is deeply rooted in local consumers’ mind,” Kwang Yang chairman Allen Ko (柯勝峰) said in an interview with a small group of reporters on Wednesday last week.
Gogoro holds 77 percent of the domestic electric scooter market, while Kwang Yang only has 4 percent, according to the Industrial Development Bureau’s tallies.
As of Thursday, Gogoro had sold 345,190 electric vehicles versus Kwang Yang’s 19,215.
“To catch the consumer’s eye, we have to adopt a new brand and forgo KYMCO,” Ko said. “You will not see KYMCO in our electric scooter commercials anymore.”
The company has replaced the KYMCO label with Ionex for its new electric scooters, he said.
Kwang Yang plans to open 11 dedicated stores for its electric scooters, called Ionex stores, within one month and aims to more than quadruple that to 50 by the end of this year.
However, Kwang Yang is not ready for a spin-off at this time, Ko said.
Electric scooters and gasoline-powered scooters are developed and manufactured in the same factories to maintain cost-efficiency, Ko said.
The Ionex brand will only be adopted for the local brand, as its KYMCO brand is better known in global markets, Ko said.
Kwang Yang offers electric scooters to GrabWheels, an electric scooter sharing service arm of Grab Holdings Inc, in Indonesia, he said.
Battery supply is as important, if Kwang Yang wants to become a key player, Ko said.
This was Kwang Yang’s weakness, as the company had previously rolled out scooters that riders could only charge at home or at charging stations, he said.
Kwang Yang plans to build 1,500 battery swap stations by the end of this year and to increase the number to 4,000 by the end of next year.
It is forming partnerships with Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), President Chain Store Corp (統一超商), Fubon Insurance Co (富邦產險) and Carrefour Taiwan (家樂福) to install battery swap stations, it said.
To speed up deployment, Kwang Yang is considering signing up electric scooter riders who have space that can be turned into a small-scale battery swap station, he said.
He attributed a short supply of fully charged batteries to a slump in domestic electric scooter sales last year, in addition to adjustments in purchase subsidies from the government.
To ensure sufficient battery supply, Kwang Yang said it is taking a different approach from its major rival.
The company will suspend sales of electric scooters if its pace of battery swap deployment cannot keep up with the pace of its sales growth, Ko said.
It also offers riders two types of batteries — for charging or swapping.
Gogoro riders can only swap batteries with fully-charged ones at battery swap stations, which requires an intensive network.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
RSS