Foxconn has set up a wholly-owned company with NT$100 million (US$3.05 million; US$1=NT$32.75) paid-in capital for its robot business in Taiwan and expects to begin selling Pepper Robots, which were jointly developed by Foxconn and Japanese operator Softbank, earliest in the third quarter of this year, reported China Times on May 18. In addition to building a cloud computing platform for the Pepper ecosystem, the robot company will also provide customers with support and maintenance services, applications, and software verification. The robot company will initially focus on marketing and selling Pepper Robots before expanding to other innovative products. Meanwhile, the Taiwanese telecom operator Asia Pacific Telecom (APT), of which Foxconn is the major shareholder, will be one of the channel distributors of Pepper Robots and will work with local companies and developers to develop software applications dedicated to the robot.