Pioneering pub owner all charged up about new electric scooter venture
Print Edition
ABOUT 23 years ago, Robert Young came to Shanghai to set up one of the city’s first few Western-style pubs.
Now, the 53-year-old New Zealander has channeled his entrepreneurial spirit once again. He has traded in drink coasters and beer mugs for wheels and batteries to become the proud owner of Carletto, the only officially registered foreign electric scooter manufacturer in Shanghai. The company is based at the Jucheng Pioneering Park in the Pudong New Area.
The company prides itself on the quality of its scooters, which in Young’s opinion is what makes his products stand out. It is the main reason that he, together with his business partner Dave Kelly, decided to jump into the scooter business two years ago.
“Most scooters you see on the streets now are probably going to last two to three years,” he explains. “So we saw an opportunity to build a better one. Our scooter may be more expensive, but it is of decent quality.”
Decently qualified
Each Carletto scooter, which retails for 4,800 yuan (US$723), is designed with an emphasis on both safety and convenience. The scooter is equipped with high-quality shock absorbers built to handle bumpy road surfaces.
“It’ll feel as if you’re gliding over the road,” laughs Young.
However, the battery is the pièce de résistance. Compared with regular scooters, which use lead acid batteries, Carletto uses lightweight lithium 5-kilogram batteries imported from South Korea.
“Lead acid batteries are terrible for the environment, have poor performance and are extremely heavy. People often have to take the entire scooter up to their apartments to charge them, which causes a major inconvenience,” says Young.
The company had an in-house designer build the scooter from scratch, which took about three to four months to complete.
Most importantly, it is legal to own a Carletto scooter. With the recent police crackdown and the law decreeing that all scooters in Shanghai have official registration plates by February next year, legal compliance has become a main worry among scooter riders in Shanghai.
Carletto received approval in May, meaning that its scooters can be issued official registration plates from the police. It took about a year for the scooter to be approved by the authorities during which it was subjected to strict inspections.
The pair has since sunk over US$1 million into their business. Today, Carletto has about 10 full-time staff, including factory workers and engineers.
The production cycle, which assembles about 150 scooters each time, runs every three weeks at their 1,300-square-meter factory that was acquired about a year ago.
Although things are currently running smoothly at Carletto, starting a business in China these days, according to Young, is no easy feat. “Twenty years ago, maybe things were a bit more flexible but now the law is more regulated. You really have to do everything by the book.”
Strict regulations were not the only problem that he had to contend with. Getting good quality components for the scooter was another issue.
“If we couldn’t get good quality parts like frames, panels and batteries, we had to develop them ourselves,” he says.
Indeed, there is a testing room at the factory where a full-time engineer develops new components. The materials, except for the battery, are all sourced locally from Taizhou, Zhejiang Province.
Both Young and Kelly own scooters in Shanghai, which they say are more convenient than driving a car.
Kelly, who has been living in Shanghai for about 20 years, says: “Riding a scooter in Shanghai is great. The infrastructure is already in place for people who were riding bicycles years ago, so it’s perfect for the scooters.”
The duo has ambitious plans for their company. They are looking to open their very own retail shop in Shanghai next year and eventually try to export the bikes to Europe as well.
“Electric scooter technology is improving very quickly. Within a few years there will be a larger market for scooters overseas,” says Young.
“For us, it’ll be a good opportunity if importers want to deal with a foreign manufacturer in Shanghai.”
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