Taiwan company denies manufacturing exploding Hezbollah pagers

Taipei, Sept. 18 (CNA) A Taiwanese company which reportedly has exported the pagers that exploded and killed Hezbollah members in Lebanon denied the allegation on Wednesday, saying the pagers in question were manufactured by a firm licensing its brand.

Gold Apollo, the Taiwanese company that foreign media alleged to be the company from which militant group Hezbollah had ordered their pagers, said that it did not make the pagers that exploded.

Hsu Ching-kuang (許清光), chairman of the company, told the media that the batch of pagers that exploded in Lebanon on Tuesday was not manufactured by Gold Apollo.

He explained that a foreign company became Gold Apollo's agency to distribute its products in certain areas three years ago.

"Less than two years ago," the foreign company, which Hsu called "BAC company," started to manufacture the pagers themselves while continuing to use Gold Apollo's brand.

Hsu said he asked BAC the reason it wished to self-manufacture the pagers, which Hsu believed were less usable and looked bad, BAC replied at the time that it had its own engineers.

Gold Apollo released a statement on the same day saying that the company only provided brand trademark authorization for BAC Consulting KFT, based in Hungary's capital, to sell the products in certain regions, with Gold Apollo's brand on them.

Still, BAC was solely responsible for designing and manufacturing the products, Gold Apollo said.

The pagers that exploded were AR-924s, which Gold Apollo in the statement reiterated was of the kind that BAC manufactures and sells.

Gold Apollo emphasized that it was "not involved in the design or manufacturing of this product."

Meanwhile, Hsu said he is considering legal action against BAC as he "has been doing the business for years and does not wish [the brand] to be tainted."

He initially declined to respond to questions concerning BAC's location and exactly which company it is. But in a later statement, Gold Apollo said the company, BAC Consulting KFT, was based in Budapest, Hungary.

According to the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), Gold Apollo had no record of directly exporting its products to Lebanon in recent years.

Gold Apollo manufactures and assembles its products in Taiwan, and the destinations of the exported products are mainly Europe and North America, MOEA said.

The pagers made in Taiwan are only capable of receiving signals and use AA batteries, which are unlikely to cause fatal explosions, the ministry cited the company as saying.

According to MOEA export data, the company exported around 260,000 sets of pagers between 2022 and August 2024. This year alone as of the end of August, 40,929 sets were exported, mainly to Europe and North America.