Asia Express - Consumer Electronics
Taiwan Helps Indonesian Agriculture Industry Improve Pesticide Spray Efficiency by Nearly 20 Times with Homegrown Drone Solutions
September 30, 2022
The Smart City Taiwan project has assisted Taiwan's unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) intelligent product manufacturer IoT-APP Co. to promote the company's pilot dispatching platform for agricultural drones to Indonesia and has boosted the homegrown drone rate to more than 60%, according to MIC (Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute), a major government think tank and research institute, and a division of III (Institute for Information Industry). The project has helped IoT-APP set up test sites in New Taipei City, Taoyuan City, and Yunlin County. At the sites, the company has conducted testing on the feasibility of the company's pilot dispatching platform for agricultural drones and the use of drones in large-scale farmland based on the Proof of Concept (POC) and the Proof of Business (POB). In addition, Taiwan's Chung Yuan Christian University also facilitates IoT-APP to set up a new startup in Indonesia and move part of the company's drone assembly business to Indonesia as well. This platform also helps reduce the agricultural manpower demand and improve pesticide spray efficiency in Indonesia. At present, the total spraying area of this platform in Taiwan and Indonesia has reached 510 hectares, and it has created more than NT$12 million (US$ 370,000) in revenue from training and spraying services. 
To date, the Smart City Taiwan project has succeeded in driving 22 counties and cities and 319 companies in Taiwan to invest and come out with about 240 smart application solutions. Among them, 48 solutions in the fields of agricultural spraying, transportation, aquaculture, and education have been exported to 27 countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, and South Korea. Since 2018, the derivative investment has reached NT$67.808 billion while the number of smart services used has exceeded 510 million with approximately 8.54 million paying users