Local manufacturer of motorcycles is bowing out of the Race after four years

You’ve run your race (quite) well, A Bike.
After four years, Alife Air Automobiles, a local motorcycle manufacturer is closing down and being liquidated of its assets. After the now-defunct Tiger Motors, Alife Air Automobiles remained the only Singapore company to produce motorcycles in recent years.

Founded by Devan Nair, the president and group chief executive of Alife, stopped production early last year because of high rental and labour costs, as well as a mysterious “shareholder dispute”.  Alife started with a scooter called A Bike Knight and continued producing other bikes in its Bukit Batok base where they have a showroom and an assembly plant.

It was reported that Alife had an order book of about 300 scooters from S H Cycle Pte Ltd, assembled by parts that came from China and engines from the US, but only delivered about 20 of them. Royston Ho, the director of S H Cycle, said that it put him in a “difficult positon” as he was planning on replacing 100 of his motorcycles that were soon to be scrapped. But because of the 280 undelivered motorcycles, he had to source out other brands.

The A Bike was first released, with 125cc and 150cc models, two years and was met with positive reviews like it was “easy to operate and maintain”.  But veterans of the industry said that they probably “lacked the experience” by having an “impossible” plan of selling 200 units per month, something that was “more than what the major players in the current market are doing”. Moreover, he said that it was already challenging enough to manufacture motorcycles in Singapore what with the high labour and rental costs. Even “major Japanese brands have established their plants in markets with lower costs,” referring to Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Without a certificate of entitlement, it was pointed out by other experts that the A Bike was “too expensive” at about $5,000 while other Indonesian or Chinese-made motorcycles of the same capacity were sold at under $3,000.

(Images: ALIFE facebook)