Luxgen Motor Co (納智捷汽車), a subsidiary of Taiwan-based auto conglomerate Yulon Motor Co (裕隆), has received about 25,000 preorders for its n7 electric vehicle model, a Yulon executive said recently as he looked ahead to the vehicle market’s future.
Luxgen received 15,000 orders for its n7 sport utility vehicle 32 hours into the preorder period that began in September, and Yulon Motor Co vice president Li Chien-hui (李建輝) said that number has risen to about 25,000 since then.
He said the sport utility vehicle still needed time to be tested for safety and that production is not expected to begin until the fourth quarter of next year.
Photo: CNA
Shipments to fulfill the orders for 25,000 vehicles would begin that same quarter and continue into the first quarter of 2024, Li said.
The n7 model, which carries a price tag of about NT$1 million (US$32,082), is built based on the Model C prototype developed and unveiled by Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) last year.
Yulon Motor has built close business ties with Hon Hai in electric vehicle development through the MIH Consortium led by the Taiwanese tech giant.
While upbeat about the future of Luxgen’s electric vehicle, Lee was cautious about the domestic auto market’s near-term prospects after having stagnated for much of this year.
He said the uncertainty caused by high inflation and subsequent increases in interest rates around the world has hurt demand, while the supply of automotive chips remained tight, limiting vehicle shipments.
In the first 10 months of this year, 337,000 vehicles were sold in Taiwan, down 5.6 percent from a year earlier.
Lee forecast that vehicle sales would reach about 420,000 units for the full year, down from 449,854 units last year, which was already 1.7 percent lower than in 2020.
To develop alternative sources of revenue, Yulon has moved into the commercial property market and is developing a shopping center in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店) that is scheduled to start operations in the third quarter of next year.
Sitting on 43,000 ping (142,149m2) of land, the shopping mall would house prominent tenants such as Eslite (誠品) bookstore chain and a Vieshow Cinema (威秀影城) branch, Lee said.
In the first nine months of this year, Yulon posted a loss per share of NT$1.98, compared with earnings per share of NT$3.49 during the same period last year, due to massive payouts on COVID-19 insurance policies sold by subsidiary Tokio Marine Newa Insurance Co (新安東京海上產物保險).
Excluding the losses from its insurance business, Yulon posted earnings per share of almost NT$4.9 over the nine-month period.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
RSS