Taiwanese Firm Gogoro Eyes India As Hub For Making Electric Two-wheelers

Taiwanese company Gogoro plans to make India its global manufacturing base for electric two-wheelers.

Gogoro makes electric two wheelers and provides a battery swapping station network. It is working on a new platform to build a scooter that specifically addresses the needs of B2B fleet customers such as fleet owners or e-commerce players for delivery to the last mile. Currently, it manufactures only in Taiwan.  

Gogoro is looking at a dual model, namely, manufacture the scooters on its own but also provide the technology and the design to third party players so that they can also manufacture under their brand.

The battery swapping station infrastructure, however, will be provided by Gogoro and will be integrated with the scooter fleet. The company is waiting for the battery swapping policy to come through and plans to make large investments in this space in alliance with global equity funds who want to invest in this play.   

In Taiwan, 85 per cent of the electric two wheelers are manufactured by Gogoro and the remainder by companies such as Yamaha to whom Gogoro provides the power train design and expertise.  Gogoro has operations in nine countries including the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Israel, and China.

“We are planning to turn India into our global hub for manufacturing electric two wheelers and for exporting them to all our markets in the world,” said Gogoro’s India head Kaushik Burman. “We are working on designing a platform of an electric vehicle which caters to the specific needs of the B2B segment.”  

He said the product is expected to be ready by the end of this year and Gogoro will begin by rolling it out in the Delhi NCR region to begin with. After testing the waters, it will expand to other regions.

The company has tied up contracts with startups such as Zomato and Zypp and is having talks with Zomato to offer the vehicles and run the battery swapping system for its last mile fleet.  

On the size of the market for the scooters and the size of the requirement for the B2B battery swapping station network, Burman said India has 250 million two wheelers (ICE and electric). Out of these, only 1.5 million are electric.

The top 50 cities where Gogoro wants to operate account for 25 per cent of all the two wheelers - around 60 million.

Burman points out that in Delhi NCR alone, there are 17-18 million two wheelers and 10 per cent of them are being used for delivery or commercial services.

According to Gogoro’s research, around 10 per cent of the two wheelers are used by gig workers for some kind of delivery or commercial transportation service.  This is a huge market which will need to be converted to B2B electric two wheelers.

He said the company’s investment will be concentrated on building the swapping station infrastructure under which 150 swapping stations are required for every 10,000 riders. Each Gogoro swapping station outlet has 28 batteries.  

But Gogoro will not limit itself to the B2B space; in other markets, it is a largely B2C player where over 530,000 subscribers use its swapping stations and where it has undertaken the swapping of over 155 million batteries annually.