It was an unusual and disruptive workday for employees and neighbors at Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese technology company located in an office park in a leafy neighborhood a half-hour outside Taipei.
Dozens of media gathered in the hallway outside the company’s glass entrance on the third floor of Building B, with remnants of decorations wishing prosperity for the Lunar New Year still hanging.
There were several police officers inside, sitting with Hsu Ching-kuang, CEO and founder of Gold Apollo. On the blackboard in the room, someone had written AR-924, the model number of the pagers that exploded simultaneously, halfway around the world, in the attack on Hezbollah members in Lebanon on Tuesday. The explosions killed at least nine people and wounded nearly 3,000 others, further escalating tensions in the Middle East.
Coverage of the regional crisis shifted to Taiwan, and specifically to Gold Apollo’s headquarters, after images emerged of pagers with stickers on the back that appeared to match those manufactured by the company.
Hsu had previously appeared before international media to deny that his company was behind the production of these locators, explaining that they were manufactured by a European company with the right to use the Gold Apollo trademark. [en un comunicado, la empresa taiwanesa señala concretamente a la compañía BAC, que tiene sede en Budapest].
“This product does not belong to us,” he said. “We are a responsible company, it is very humiliating.”
Founded in 1995 by Hsu, Gold Apollo now has 40 employees. Tutor He could not confirm when the company’s website, which was inaccessible on Wednesday, went down. In an archived version from April you can see the page dedicated to the AR-924. “A configurable and flexible design,” the company’s text on the model says.
The crowd of reporters grew as the morning wore on. A female employee poked her head through the door to promise that there would be statements soon. Inside, a uniformed police officer was leafing through a stack of papers with photos of the pagers that had exploded. Hsu then appeared for a second statement on camera, denying once again, and in a slightly shaky voice, that the Taiwan-based company had supplied the pagers.
As media crowded around Hsu, a security guard approached the scene to retrieve printed statements that some journalists had dropped from the ground. The guard took photos of them to send to his boss, who was in the lower part of the building and wondering what the unusual scene was.
Shortly after, media attention focused on Europe. A delivery man who arrived with a package intended for an Apollo Gold employee seemed to be confused.
Translation by Francisco de Zárate.
