MOVE Asia, Asia's most important mobility event, held online in Singapore from September 7th to 9th. At this event, Kay Woo, the CEO of MVL, delivered his speech today (7th) on the theme of ‘Tech, Data & Innovation'.
MOVE Asia leads to driving changes in urban mobility across Asia. The 150 speakers will discuss and share their opinions on 7 dedicated themes: MaaS, electric vehicles, city freight, smart cities, energy, charging, and battery tech. The major speakers other than Kay, include Gojek, Deloitte, the Ministry of Transport and Communications Taiwan, and others from various businesses.
Date: Sep 7- 9th, 2021 (Kay’s speech: Sep 7th 14:00 SGT)
Topic: “Making mobility technologies work for people”
This event will be held online and you can view it in real-time through the link below.
➡️ https://www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/move-asia/index.stm
Here is the speech that Kay Woo has given in MOVE Asia.
Making mobility technologies work for people - Kay Woo
Hi everyone. This is Kay from MVL and thanks for having me here.
We work very hard every single day to build a mobility ecosystem to make our drivers happy so that they can provide the best service to their customers who are riders.
So, let me share my true experience with you all today. So I have started my startup business in 2012 and I've failed three different times very miserably and my latest failure is somebody taught me to think differently and made me focus on solving drivers' problems. Back in 2015, I was in Hong Kong to build a limo-reservations service between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and to connect the drivers to our corporate client, so I had to have meetings with rental car companies and car operators. Whenever I had a meeting with drivers and the car operators, they were asked a question that, 'what do you want from me?'
And actually, this was because commission-based platform service models like Uber or DiDi, very popular back in the days and even now. But my explanation to them was that I'm trying to make things more efficient by charging less commission. In other words, and this is actually we are not that different at all, and as you expected that we had a hard time acquiring corporates and a driver, and we couldn't grow faster and further. And also lots of lots of problems or happening like, drivers' complain and ESG kind of thing is also coming up these days, but we were and we are still a small mobility startup and to get the spotlight from industry or investors, ironically, you need to have enough fund to earn for acquiring demand for drivers or you should have a cutting-edge technology that you can say that you can make money like a genius, like Tesla. But I'm pretty sure that almost all startups do not have that kind of ability or capacity or money. And we also did not have either of them. So what did we do was quite interesting. We asked ourselves that maybe we should do something different. So, either way, whatever we do we may die, or we may survive but if we die, let's do everything that we want to do. So we concluded that we should do things a different way, which is nobody ever did before.
So, while I'm staying in Shenzhen in 2016 and 17, and luckily, I've got the chance to learn about blockchain. Well, back in 2015, 16 in China was not about blockchain but it’s all about Bitcoin and investment and speculation. But there are some people following up the blockchain heavily, and there was a very small number of people who are following up the blockchain technology. And, actually, this was the biggest turning point of my Startup life.
Although it will take a much longer time through the blockchain philosophy, we found the way that changes in mobility service and 100% decrease and may these, I say, go giant platforms like Uber or other giant platform looking like legacy platform and put drivers first within this blockchain philosophy.
So by setting up the Mass Vehicle Ledger, mobility blockchain protocol, we can finally put the driver first priority and try to change the mobility service landscape by introducing TADA with zero- commission. This zero-commission was a huge success and up to now, we have acquired more than hundreds k drivers from Singapore and Cambodia, and Vietnam. Singapore, only, we've acquired more than 45,000 plus drivers in Singapore operation itself, even though we are very small and tiny but we can sustain ourselves as of now.
This is one of the very best turns up that we had, and because of the blockchain fundamental that we are building and on top of that we introduced TADA, so with the token economy and blockchain philosophy, we didn't need to pick drivers' pocket. so that's the reason why we could do zero commission and we could focus on the real value building with the drivers.
So, with the zero commission, we've acquired lots of lots of drivers over, but there is another homework for us to do so, which is acquiring a demand for the driver. Zero commission is not enough because drivers also need to make an income for themselves for a living. If we don't have enough ability to bring the demand for them, it's useless. Right? So what we did is actually we were collaborating together with many different platform services, such as mobile payment services in international or local banking services. For example, the international mobile payment service, Alipay, or other services, we are collaborating with them and help them to marketize to do the marketing with their Chinese customer whenever they come to Singapore, Southeast Asia, we can serve with our platform, and accepting the Alipay. By having this kind of collaboration, we could acquire a certain number of drivers and customers and we could grow further and further together. And also, we wanted to help drivers to bring more jobs, so we wanted to bring this delivery opportunity to our drivers, but while we are preparing this delivery service, was back in 2017 and 18. We were preparing this to connect more income to drivers but interestingly it was right before the pandemic of Covid-19 and when the Covid-19 pandemic happened, the delivery demand is skyrocket. So now our services growing together with the delivery and the ride-hailing, and every call of drivers together. This delivery business becomes also software-as-a-service, so now we are supplying this solution to multi different countries who want to use our solution together.
So our focus is very simple.
Do everything for drivers. Luckily, we had two great strategic investors from the car- parts industries, and then I got huge support from them to build the electric three-wheeler. So we are manufacturing this electric three-wheeler in Cambodia and this is one of them, the biggest step forward for us as a software company to make hardware. It's not a simple decision, but we wanted to create a better opportunity for our drivers by introducing this. This means that we didn't aim to create huge revenue by selling these vehicles. But what we are rooting for is creating an ecosystem with battery stations together to supply these to our drivers. And also, this is actually a meaning that we tried to fortify our MVL ecosystem by supporting our TADA drivers with the electric vehicle and also the battery station together.
So this is the three-wheeler that we were making in Cambodia and this electric three-wheeler will have a different variation cargo version later but this passenger version will be introduced in Cambodia first, and it will be connected to the neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, also this will be introduced together with our Indian partner, and this will be introduced in the Indian market probably next year.
So this three-wheeler is equipped with three battery packs and it can go up to a maximum speed of 55 Km and a maximum driving distance is around a hundred kilometers. And this is the image of the swappable battery, and these batteries will be hosted inside of our battery stations. So, this station is somewhat like a gas station but we're combining this battery station together with our electric vehicle service and also the delivery hub. These electric vehicle battery stations are equipped with lots of batteries, which is between a thousand to two thousand batteries inside of it. And whenever a driver comes to the station, they can just simply drop their used batteries and then change to the new batteries, and then they can just go.
The vehicle itself is connected to our platform service so we know how much energy they consume so because of that the data information is recorded onto the blockchain protocol so we can seamlessly charge the amount of their energy usage through the wallet service of our platform service. And this is one of the closings of the small cycle of our ecosystem building. So with the ride-hailing service, with the delivery service, with the electric vehicle usage, and with the battery station itself everything is interconnected and within the small cycle that we are building the whole ecosystem together.
So our view of the future and the vision is very simple and straightforward. if drivers and all those geek workers and platform participants do not, or if they cannot get the right reward and right support, either platform, and it's going to be a problem very badly. Even that happened in the US and other countries and the government tried to regulate those geek workers as employees of those platform services. And even for the Indian side, those big, let's say grocery delivery platforms, but the company belly becomes more than 11 billion or 12 billion dollars but the drivers working for them are like getting nothing. They've been used by the platform and not getting rewarded probably and enough.
So what we want to do is actually to bring the software in the whole concept and whole idea to support regionally and also world-widely. We have our partners in India, we have other partners in Mexico, in different countries, and in Ethiopia, there is a place that’s using our solutions to provide their ride-hailing services and this Ethiopian partner would likely use our delivery, and later will utilize the electric vehicle and electric battery station as well. By connecting all these different players and partners all over the world, and by supporting our option protocol and ride-hailing and delivery solution and further, electric vehicle infrastructure together, by doing it we can create the whole different network and through the different countries. And we believe that this is the one that we can connect to this blockchain protocol network within the data, so every different service, different country, utilizing our software and whenever customer use our service or their service, our partners’ service, there is going to be mobility data being generated, and with this data, we can do many different things. For example, the credit services, and also the loan service and also we can create real-time information, the map service, and the local services. There are so many different things that we can do, but all in all, why we are doing this is to solve and address the problems drivers facing these days.
So our core focus is making our drivers happy and this is going to be an unchanged fundamental value for us to build in MVL blockchain protocol and also building the ride-hailing service and different services. And if our drivers can get rewards properly and they get compensated in the right and fair amount of money, then we can build our platform and democracy throughout the world together. This is how we believe in. Even though the speed of growth is quite slower than a typical ride-hailing platform, who's burning billions of dollars, we believe that this is one of the ways that we can grow faster and longer. We are not shooting for the short-term return; we are shooting for longevity. So that's what we are and that's what we are aiming for.
Thanks for listening today and we can fix it together. So anybody who wants to utilize our ride-hailing solution, delivery solutions, or EV making or EV energy infrastructure business, just let us know. We are here to support you and thank you very much.
MOVE Asia, Asia's most important mobility event, held online in Singapore from September 7th to 9th. At this event, Kay Woo, the CEO of MVL, delivered his speech today (7th) on the theme of ‘Tech, Data & Innovation'.
MOVE Asia leads to driving changes in urban mobility across Asia. The 150 speakers will discuss and share their opinions on 7 dedicated themes: MaaS, electric vehicles, city freight, smart cities, energy, charging, and battery tech. The major speakers other than Kay, include Gojek, Deloitte, the Ministry of Transport and Communications Taiwan, and others from various businesses.
Date: Sep 7- 9th, 2021 (Kay’s speech: Sep 7th 14:00 SGT)
Topic: “Making mobility technologies work for people”
This event will be held online and you can view it in real-time through the link below.
➡️ https://www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/move-asia/index.stm
Here is the speech that Kay Woo has given in MOVE Asia.
Making mobility technologies work for people - Kay Woo
Hi everyone. This is Kay from MVL and thanks for having me here.
We work very hard every single day to build a mobility ecosystem to make our drivers happy so that they can provide the best service to their customers who are riders.
So, let me share my true experience with you all today. So I have started my startup business in 2012 and I've failed three different times very miserably and my latest failure is somebody taught me to think differently and made me focus on solving drivers' problems. Back in 2015, I was in Hong Kong to build a limo-reservations service between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and to connect the drivers to our corporate client, so I had to have meetings with rental car companies and car operators. Whenever I had a meeting with drivers and the car operators, they were asked a question that, 'what do you want from me?'
And actually, this was because commission-based platform service models like Uber or DiDi, very popular back in the days and even now. But my explanation to them was that I'm trying to make things more efficient by charging less commission. In other words, and this is actually we are not that different at all, and as you expected that we had a hard time acquiring corporates and a driver, and we couldn't grow faster and further. And also lots of lots of problems or happening like, drivers' complain and ESG kind of thing is also coming up these days, but we were and we are still a small mobility startup and to get the spotlight from industry or investors, ironically, you need to have enough fund to earn for acquiring demand for drivers or you should have a cutting-edge technology that you can say that you can make money like a genius, like Tesla. But I'm pretty sure that almost all startups do not have that kind of ability or capacity or money. And we also did not have either of them. So what did we do was quite interesting. We asked ourselves that maybe we should do something different. So, either way, whatever we do we may die, or we may survive but if we die, let's do everything that we want to do. So we concluded that we should do things a different way, which is nobody ever did before.
So, while I'm staying in Shenzhen in 2016 and 17, and luckily, I've got the chance to learn about blockchain. Well, back in 2015, 16 in China was not about blockchain but it’s all about Bitcoin and investment and speculation. But there are some people following up the blockchain heavily, and there was a very small number of people who are following up the blockchain technology. And, actually, this was the biggest turning point of my Startup life.
Although it will take a much longer time through the blockchain philosophy, we found the way that changes in mobility service and 100% decrease and may these, I say, go giant platforms like Uber or other giant platform looking like legacy platform and put drivers first within this blockchain philosophy.
So by setting up the Mass Vehicle Ledger, mobility blockchain protocol, we can finally put the driver first priority and try to change the mobility service landscape by introducing TADA with zero- commission. This zero-commission was a huge success and up to now, we have acquired more than hundreds k drivers from Singapore and Cambodia, and Vietnam. Singapore, only, we've acquired more than 45,000 plus drivers in Singapore operation itself, even though we are very small and tiny but we can sustain ourselves as of now.
This is one of the very best turns up that we had, and because of the blockchain fundamental that we are building and on top of that we introduced TADA, so with the token economy and blockchain philosophy, we didn't need to pick drivers' pocket. so that's the reason why we could do zero commission and we could focus on the real value building with the drivers.
So, with the zero commission, we've acquired lots of lots of drivers over, but there is another homework for us to do so, which is acquiring a demand for the driver. Zero commission is not enough because drivers also need to make an income for themselves for a living. If we don't have enough ability to bring the demand for them, it's useless. Right? So what we did is actually we were collaborating together with many different platform services, such as mobile payment services in international or local banking services. For example, the international mobile payment service, Alipay, or other services, we are collaborating with them and help them to marketize to do the marketing with their Chinese customer whenever they come to Singapore, Southeast Asia, we can serve with our platform, and accepting the Alipay. By having this kind of collaboration, we could acquire a certain number of drivers and customers and we could grow further and further together. And also, we wanted to help drivers to bring more jobs, so we wanted to bring this delivery opportunity to our drivers, but while we are preparing this delivery service, was back in 2017 and 18. We were preparing this to connect more income to drivers but interestingly it was right before the pandemic of Covid-19 and when the Covid-19 pandemic happened, the delivery demand is skyrocket. So now our services growing together with the delivery and the ride-hailing, and every call of drivers together. This delivery business becomes also software-as-a-service, so now we are supplying this solution to multi different countries who want to use our solution together.
So our focus is very simple.
Do everything for drivers. Luckily, we had two great strategic investors from the car- parts industries, and then I got huge support from them to build the electric three-wheeler. So we are manufacturing this electric three-wheeler in Cambodia and this is one of them, the biggest step forward for us as a software company to make hardware. It's not a simple decision, but we wanted to create a better opportunity for our drivers by introducing this. This means that we didn't aim to create huge revenue by selling these vehicles. But what we are rooting for is creating an ecosystem with battery stations together to supply these to our drivers. And also, this is actually a meaning that we tried to fortify our MVL ecosystem by supporting our TADA drivers with the electric vehicle and also the battery station together.
So this is the three-wheeler that we were making in Cambodia and this electric three-wheeler will have a different variation cargo version later but this passenger version will be introduced in Cambodia first, and it will be connected to the neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, also this will be introduced together with our Indian partner, and this will be introduced in the Indian market probably next year.
So this three-wheeler is equipped with three battery packs and it can go up to a maximum speed of 55 Km and a maximum driving distance is around a hundred kilometers. And this is the image of the swappable battery, and these batteries will be hosted inside of our battery stations. So, this station is somewhat like a gas station but we're combining this battery station together with our electric vehicle service and also the delivery hub. These electric vehicle battery stations are equipped with lots of batteries, which is between a thousand to two thousand batteries inside of it. And whenever a driver comes to the station, they can just simply drop their used batteries and then change to the new batteries, and then they can just go.
The vehicle itself is connected to our platform service so we know how much energy they consume so because of that the data information is recorded onto the blockchain protocol so we can seamlessly charge the amount of their energy usage through the wallet service of our platform service. And this is one of the closings of the small cycle of our ecosystem building. So with the ride-hailing service, with the delivery service, with the electric vehicle usage, and with the battery station itself everything is interconnected and within the small cycle that we are building the whole ecosystem together.
So our view of the future and the vision is very simple and straightforward. if drivers and all those geek workers and platform participants do not, or if they cannot get the right reward and right support, either platform, and it's going to be a problem very badly. Even that happened in the US and other countries and the government tried to regulate those geek workers as employees of those platform services. And even for the Indian side, those big, let's say grocery delivery platforms, but the company belly becomes more than 11 billion or 12 billion dollars but the drivers working for them are like getting nothing. They've been used by the platform and not getting rewarded probably and enough.
So what we want to do is actually to bring the software in the whole concept and whole idea to support regionally and also world-widely. We have our partners in India, we have other partners in Mexico, in different countries, and in Ethiopia, there is a place that’s using our solutions to provide their ride-hailing services and this Ethiopian partner would likely use our delivery, and later will utilize the electric vehicle and electric battery station as well. By connecting all these different players and partners all over the world, and by supporting our option protocol and ride-hailing and delivery solution and further, electric vehicle infrastructure together, by doing it we can create the whole different network and through the different countries. And we believe that this is the one that we can connect to this blockchain protocol network within the data, so every different service, different country, utilizing our software and whenever customer use our service or their service, our partners’ service, there is going to be mobility data being generated, and with this data, we can do many different things. For example, the credit services, and also the loan service and also we can create real-time information, the map service, and the local services. There are so many different things that we can do, but all in all, why we are doing this is to solve and address the problems drivers facing these days.
So our core focus is making our drivers happy and this is going to be an unchanged fundamental value for us to build in MVL blockchain protocol and also building the ride-hailing service and different services. And if our drivers can get rewards properly and they get compensated in the right and fair amount of money, then we can build our platform and democracy throughout the world together. This is how we believe in. Even though the speed of growth is quite slower than a typical ride-hailing platform, who's burning billions of dollars, we believe that this is one of the ways that we can grow faster and longer. We are not shooting for the short-term return; we are shooting for longevity. So that's what we are and that's what we are aiming for.
Thanks for listening today and we can fix it together. So anybody who wants to utilize our ride-hailing solution, delivery solutions, or EV making or EV energy infrastructure business, just let us know. We are here to support you and thank you very much.