We call it the curse of the SPAC. Over the last five years, multiple electric mobility players have taken the SPAC route to list on the Nasdaq. Not even one is doing well. From Damon (technically not a SPAC) to Zapp, and from Livewire to Gogoro, SPACs have often not ended well for E2W players. We covered this in detail many months back.
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Gogoro, the Taiwanese battery swapping innovator, took the SPAC route in April 2022. At that time, the move looked logical. Gogoro was a great name. Battery swapping was hot. The world, outside China, was discovering electric mass mobility. Battery prices were high. Swapping was logical.
Gogoro rolled out hundreds of swap stations in Taiwan, its home market. The genuine business model, with the PR hype, made it the story to follow, even for startups outside Taiwan. Battery as a service became the mobility startup’s buzzword. Even India-based, Softbank-backed Ola Electric was developing a battery for swapping before it pivoted and acquired Etergo to get into the scooter business.
Gogoro was hot in the early 2020s, and before the eventual SPAC-listing in April 2022, the startup already had Ruentex, Panasonic, Taiwan’s National Development Bank, Sumitomo, Engie, and Temasek on its captable. It was finally listed in mid-April 2022 through a SPAC and within hours hit a market cap of USD 4.6 billion.
However, soon after, and since then, continuously, there has been a relentless crash in value. The company now has a market cap of a little above USD 57 million (as of 24-Oct-2025).
The Nasdaq Delisting Issue
In fact, Gogoro received a delisting notice from Nasdaq as it violated the Nasdaq Listing Rule 5450(a)(1). We wrote about this in November 2024 when reporting the Q3 2024 financials. Specifically, this is what we wrote:
With steady losses comes the problem of a falling share price, and there is a point where you start hitting the barrier called Nasdaq Listing Rule 5450(a)(1). On Oct 29th, Gogoro received a notice from NASDAQ indicating that for the last 30 consecutive business days, the closing bid price of the Company’s ordinary shares was below the minimum bid price of US$1.00 per share requirement outlined in Nasdaq Listing Rule 5450(a)(1).
Gogoro had till April 28, 2025, to get compliant again (get its share price to trade and close above USD 1.0). That did not happen, and on April 17, 2025, the company applied to transfer the listing of its Securities from the Nasdaq Global Select Market (NGSM) to the Nasdaq Capital Market (NCM). NCM requires less compliance than NGSM. This did not take away the USD 1.0 compliance, though it gave Gogoro another 180 days to get compliant.
However, it looked likely that the share price would not recover on its own, so on Sept 16, 2025, Gogoro announced that it would do a 1-for-20 reverse stock split. This effectively multiplies the share price by 20, and that is the price we see on the exchanges today.
The Core of Gogoro’s Problems
What appears to be Gogoro’s strength is actually its core problem. Battery swapping networks are like golden handcuffs. They may look nice, but they are still constraints. The CAPEX in deploying a battery swapping network meaningfully to service even a small geography is huge. We first wrote about this in July 2024.
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Batteries and swapping stations are capital-hungry. We don’t know exactly how much it costs Gogoro to set up one swapping station, but a 2015 Wired article put the cost for an eight-battery swapping rack at USD 10,000 in 2015 dollars. At the end of 2024, Gogoro had 12,500 of these racks and more than 1.3 million batteries in circulation in Taiwan alone. That is USD 150 million in capital deployed.
Note that batteries in circulation include batteries inside racks and batteries inside scooters. Between the racks and the batteries, not counting the charging station infrastructure, the batteries in transit, the batteries written off, and the associated manufacturing equipment, there is an estimated capital deployment of USD 650 million in Taiwan alone.
At the end of Q2 2025, Gogoro is supporting 648,000 swapping customers. We estimate that it takes Gogoro about 40 months to recover the investment per battery. That should not be a problem, considering Gogoro uses a 10-year financial model for its battery profitability.
But a 10-year financial model is questionable. Gogoro’s old batteries use 18650 cells with (likely) NCA chemistry. The new batteries use 21700 cells with (likely) NCM chemistry. Cycle life cannot be more than 2000.
The model also creates further CAPEX problems. With 1.3 million batteries in circulation in Taiwan and an overall Gogoro-powered scooter parc of less than 650,000 scooters, we are looking at a Battery-Sets-to-Vehicle Ratio of nearly 2.0. This may be okay in Taiwan, but it is achieved only because Gogoro has always been in a cash-burning phase. Such a ratio would be killing in an emerging geography where players target a sub-1.5 ratio.
International Expansion is Near Impossible: Collapse in Europe
The high CAPEX means that any expansion outside Taiwan is going to bleed as much as the home market did. Gogoro has undertaken many international expansions, but they have eventually ended in disappointment.
Gogoro’s first international expansion was way back in Aug 2016 with Coup in Berlin. They deployed 200 scooters. This was followed by Paris in 2017, and later on Madrid in March 2019. However, in November 2019, Coup shut down, citing high operational costs. At its peak, the Bosch owned Coup had more than 1600 scooters under deployment. The assets were later sold to Tier Mobility in February 2020. Eventually, Tier would close down its Gogoro-powered battery swapping by the end of 2022, focusing only on cycle and e-kickscooter sharing.
It didn’t help that many of Gogoro’s scooters deployed in Europe were the original Smartscooter, the S1. This was an expensive scooter that happened to sit at the top of an expensive business model that is built on the premise of optimizing TCO benefits in ride sharing.
It never made sense.
When other ride-sharing companies found Niu, Gogoro’s days were numbered. Swapping or no swapping, the cost of operation is sacrosanct in any business model that plans to charge a subscription fee from the retail customer.
Since then, Gogoro has initiated several international ventures. However, for all practical purposes, most of these have been glorified pilots built with the idea that a local partner would eventually help raise the CAPEX needed to roll out an expensive battery swapping network.
It never happens.
…and in India
Take India. Gogoro initiated the journey with a tie-up with Hero MotoCorp, India’s biggest two-wheeler manufacturer. Announced in April 2021, the JV involved Hero taking a minor stake in Gogoro and the two partners eventually developing co-branded scooters that would be deployed on a Gogoro-powered swapping network. That JV never went anywhere.
Gogoro would then form another JV with Belrise Industries, a leading Tier-1 supplier in India. In January 2023, the partners would announce a plan to invest USD 2.5 billion to set up an extensive battery swapping infrastructure in India. No one mentioned where the USD 2.5 billion investment would come from. Pilots were initiated in Delhi and Goa.
Within the above JV, Gogoro assembled about 250 Crossover scooters in India. Pilots were also announced with Zomato, Zypp Electric, Swiggy, and Rapido. There was also an understanding with Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (HPCL) to roll out thousands of GoStations at HPCL pumps. Obviously, the thousands of GoStations were counting on the Gogoro-Belrise JV to raise the billions of dollars needed.
None of them made sense when we subject them to logical scrutiny.
Take the case of Swiggy and Zomato. Their riders typically use slow-speed moeds with 250W motors and a sub 25 kph top speed. A Gogoro Crossover scooter was an overkill many times over.
Or take Zypp Electric. The Gurgaon-based fleet manager relies on ultra-cheap Chinese kit shit scooters in its fleet. The Crossover would have been much too expensive for the venture.
Ditto for the Rapido bike taxi pilot.
Somewhere in the mix, Gogoro was also expecting generous incentives from the Indian government, again an illogical expectation considering the Indian government has been systematically reducing subsidies on E2Ws.
In Aug 2024, media reports indicated that Gogoro is pausing its Indian expansion because of a lack of clarity from the government on battery swapping incentives. As of today, Gogoro India is nothing more than a glorified pilot.
Lack of Scale in Other International Ventures
Apart from Europe (phase 1) and India, Gogoro has international ventures going on in multiple other geographies. These include a very little talked about swapping pilot in China, a joint venture with Yadea and Dachangjiang, two of the largest two-wheeler players in China. Under the joint venture, the three participants together launched the Huan Huan battery swapping brand, powered by Gogoro. This was in 2021, and 80 swapping stations were planned in Hangzhou. However, a lack of reporting indicates that the venture hasn’t grown beyond the pilot stage.
There was a similar pilot in Isigaki Island in Japan. It was never talked about again.
As of today, apart from the above, Gogoro has pilots going on with Gojek in Jakarta, Jardine Cycle & Carriage in Singapore, Bikebank Dotstation in Seoul, Nebula Energy in Nepal, Metro Motor & Paz Group in Tel Aviv, Terpel Voltex in Bogota (Colombia), and Copec in Santiago (Chile).
Arguably, all these pilots are really small and require little capital injection. But then, that’s the point. Are they supposed to stay small? If they have to grow beyond pilots, they need serious capital investment.
That may not be easy. Gogoro does not have money, and the world has changed since Gogoro found battery swapping. Now, swapping is more common and easier. Sure, other players do not bring the sophistication and polish of Gogoro’s swapping, but they can do it much cheaper, and that’s what counts.
Take Seoul: The Gogoro-powered Dotstation is one of the three major networks, but it may be the third in relevance. LG-run Kooroo has more scooter partners on it, while KT Linkus has cheaper real estate. We are not aware if any other partners have agreed to develop scooters around Gogoro’s batteries.
Product or Energy?
Are we a product company or an energy company? That’s a question that will haunt E2W startups in the coming years. Arguably, investors find it somewhat better if you are an energy company. Recurring subscription revenues are valued more than one-off product sales. What gets our goat is the fact that the world’s most profitable two-wheeler manufacturers are all product companies, and every ‘energy’ company is struggling to make it.
Very early in its journey, Gogoro decided that it would be an energy company. Early-stage investors liked the idea.
That’s a pity! Gogoro makes awesome scooters. We rate the new Pulse very high as a performance scooter, and over the years, Gogoro has been consistently making good products and accessories. The new EZZY (successor to the Jego) is the perfect template of what a budget scooter should be.
And yet, Gogoro has been tying itself to subscription revenues. In some ways, it has come at the expense of its product revenues. It started with Gogoro offering its tech – batteries, motors, and E&E, to rivals like Yamaha and eMoving to create scooters that were Gogoro under the skin. In exchange, Gogoro added more customers to its subscriber base.
As a result, Gogoro’s subscription revenues have been slowly climbing. Its product revenues have been rapidly declining. The overall impact is negative.
Gogoro’s scooters are so awesome that any manufacturer in any other part of the world would give an arm and a leg to get access to the tech. But the swapping network kills the business proposition.
It also kills future products and potential international expansion. Let us explain.
Take the Honda WN7 motorcycle or the Ultraviolette X47. Arguably, Gogoro can do them better or make them more interesting. But they won’t, because the Gogoro batteries cannot power anything that goes bigger than the Pulse. In fact, the Pulse may very well be the top-end Gogoro for a long time.
What Gogoro would also not do, unless it goes against its swapping DNA, is anything with a high-voltage system.
What would also not work is a sports bike, a motocrosser, a touring bike, etc. Basically, anything that cannot be built around the Gogoro packs.
That’s a severely compromised, narrowed-down product portfolio.
The engineering teams would be secretly fuming.
The Taiwanese Market Does Not Look Promising
Taiwan has the same problem that many advanced economies have – population degrowth. The country’s population peaked around 2020 and has been shrinking since. The Taiwanese are also not getting younger. With only 23 million inhabitants on the island, and a two-wheeler parc of 7.0m+, two-wheeler penetration is already above 300 vehicles per 1000. This is much higher than that in India and does not promise great growth prospects for a country where car sales are high.
Is Gogoro Running into Immediate Cash Problems?
The company’s Q2 2025 financials were bad. Revenue was down 18.7% year-on-year to USD 65.7 million, from USD 80.94 million in Q2 2024.
The revenue from sales of scooters continued to decline. At USD 28.2 million, they were down 39% from USD 46.28 million in revenue in Q2 2024.
Meanwhile, revenue from energy sales (battery swapping) was up 8.5% to USD 37.6 million from USD 34.66 million a year back. Clearly, the improvement in battery swapping revenue is not enough to compensate for the decline in scooter sales revenue.
As a result, the company’s net losses were at USD 26.5 million, a 32% increase from the net loss of USD 20.1 million in Q2 2024.
Despite the consistent bleeding that Gogoro is suffering, we do not see any immediate threat to liquidity. The Ruentex Group is the biggest investor now, and it can stabilize the ship when needed, as it did by stepping in when the Taiwanese government opened an inquiry against the company in September 2024, and Horace Luke, the founder and CEO, had to resign. Ruentex would appoint Henry Chiang as interim CEO, and Gogoro has recently confirmed that Chiang would become the regular CEO, in the interest of stability.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
To help with the cash flow and sustain further growth-related investments, Gogoro has recently entered into a syndicated credit facility agreement with Mega International Commercial Bank and other lenders for a five-year term loan of TWD 1.07 billion (USD 35 million). Gogoro is seeking to increase this credit facility.
This obviously moves the debt-equity ratio needle quite a bit in the wrong direction.
To compensate for that, Gogoro has recently made a move to raise fresh equity for the company. On Sept 16, 2025, the company announced that it has requested Ruentex Group’s nominee on Gogoro’s board, Mr. Yin Chung Yao, to raise fresh equity investments for Gogoro to the tune of TWD 2.5 billion (USD 82 million).
That is a significant equity infusion that Gogoro is seeking. Gogoro’s market cap is only USD 57 million at the time of writing this.
