Horizon’s founding story is one that fueled with curiosity, ambition, and willingness to move forward in one of the most difficult technology spaces, and one that achieves success against all odds.
Already working as a corporate team within Eastman Chemicals’ international technology venturing arm and innovation team in the late 90s, George Gu – at the Shanghai office, and his partners at Eastman, joined forces with a mission to build the world’s first profitable fuel cell company.
Technology-agnostic and commercially focused, their ambition was to achieve sustainable decarbonisation targets without relying on government subsidies, billions of dollars of private capital, and to first and foremost – create the world’s first and only profitable fuel cell company, in an industry that had not seen a profit in 30 years, and was still quite far from breaking through.
The founding team chose Singapore as its global headquarters in 2003, and set forth a three phase commercialisation roadmap, dropping technology costs, and removing the age-old hydrogen supply barriers. One of the company’s main success factors was to start commercialisation with small and simple products that can function on tiny amounts of hydrogen to reduce logistics barriers, while preparing for larger and more complex products.
It didn’t matter what the product or the market was at the start, as long as the outcome created an opportunity to start the operations engine and re-invest positive cash flow into increasingly complex products.
Horizon ultimately emerged as the world’s largest volume producer of fuel cells regardless of size or power level, serving customers in over 65 countries with the widest selection of commercial products in the fuel cell industry, with industry leading technical performances.
Over the course of its 20 year history, Horizon went on to spin-off 3 application focused companies, including Horizon Educational – the world’s leading clean energy and hydrogen science education company, HES Energy Systems (acquired in 2015 by H3 Dynamics), and more recently HYZON Motors, a fast-growing global leader in hydrogen electric heavy vehicles.
In 2018 Horizon began the commercialization of its large scale liquid cooled PEMFC systems, and clinched the world’s first large scale commercial contract for hydrogen trucks in China, the world’s largest EV market.
Since then, the company started to partner with bus and coach makers, as well as commercial delivery vehicle manufacturers and formed
HYZON MOTORS Inc, with its global headquarters and engineering center located at the former General Motors fuel cell facility in upstate New York. This new facility is destined to become the benchmark in high power fuel cell production in the USA.