Electric scooter maker Gogoro Inc (睿能創意) yesterday posted sales of 5,120 units for last month, more than double what it sold in March last year, despite a downward trend in the wider domestic motorbike market.
The company last month maintained its position as the nation’s top electric scooter seller and ranked fifth in the overall scooter market with a market share of 6.34 percent, data compiled by local motor vehicle branches showed.
Total motorcycle sales last month dropped 1 percent annually to 80,792 units, with sales at Kwang Yang Motor Co (光陽工業), the nation’s largest scooter distributor, sliding 5.7 percent to 28,285 units.
Gogoro said it would begin offering special discounts on battery exchange subscriptions this month to encourage more customers to switch to electric scooters.
The company, which has more than 520 battery charging stations throughout the west coast, said that about 60,000 Gogoro owners have swapped a total of 10 million batteries since the company launched its first model in 2015.
Last month, the company launched portable battery chargers as an alternative option for customers.
Gororo said it plans to build new battery-swapping stations in Yilan, Hualien and Taitung counties in the first quarter of next year.
The new battery-swapping stations would ensure stable electricity supply for 48 hours in the event of a power outage, it said.
The company also aims to expand its presence in Spain after it introduced its scooter sharing services in Germany, France and Japan.
Through a strategic partnership with Coup Mobility GmbH, a subsidiary of Germany-based Robert Bosch GmbH, the company aims to make its scooters available in Madrid this summer, it said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the