HSBC Bank Taiwan Ltd (匯豐台灣商銀) has offered Gogoro Inc (睿能創意) a green loan to purchase energy-efficient products, marking the bank’s first green loan to an electric scooter manufacturer.
Although many people think green loans are exclusive to renewable energy developers, they actually have a broader application, and are extended to any business that can improve the environment, HSBC Taiwan commercial banking head Stanley Hsiao (蕭仲程) told the Taipei Times on Aug. 13.
“Whether a business can reduce carbon emissions or lower its fuel consumption are not the only criteria we use to determine whether to approve a green loan. We also take into account its deployment of energy-efficient technology as important and helpful to the environment,” Hsiao said.
Photo: Reuters
The latter makes a case for Gogoro, which does not directly use green energy to power its battery-swapping stations, but utilizes many energy-efficient components for its electric scooters, including a core component battery, he said.
To avoid having the funds used for just any environmentally friendly expenditure, the bank has required Gogoro to use the funds only for battery purchases and to routinely track the fund flow to check “if the money is being spent in the right place,” he added.
Hsiao did not disclose the size of the loan extended to the electric scooter maker due to a confidentiality agreement, saying only that the figure would be in the middle level of all green loans or sustainability-linked loans HSBC Bank Taiwan has offered.
The bank has also provided green loans or regular corporate loans to local suppliers of electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc, but the loan to Gogoro is the first to an electric scooter maker, he said.
Hsiao said he holds a conservative outlook for the growth of green loans, because compared with sustainability-linked loans, green loans have stricter rules for banks and their corporate clients.
Sustainability-linked loans allow loan-takers to use the funds for general corporate purposes, not just green projects, he said.
Given the stricter criteria for green loans, banks need to carefully communicate to clients what kinds of projects they can spend the money on and to keep on following their progress, he said.
That partly explains why sustainability-linked loans have grown faster than green loans in Taiwan, he 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
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
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
RSS