Taiwan’s military has imposed penalties of more than 140 million New Taiwan dollars ($4.3 million) on local defense startup Tron Future for failure to deliver on a counter-drone procurement contract, Defense Minister Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said last week.
Tron, which won the NTD 1 billion contract to supply Taiwan’s outlying islands with drone defense equipment in early 2025, paid a late penalty of around NTD 90 million while forfeiting its NTD 50 million performance bond.
The announcement marks the end of the ministry’s yearslong effort to acquire a counter-drone installation on the islands of Kinmen and Matsu, where Chinese civilians harassed Taiwanese military bases with off-the-shelf drones in August 2022.
The military has now decided to “start from scratch” on the project, it said, as reported by the Liberty Times, a local newspaper.
Domino Theory detailed the tribulations of its initial effort in a recent investigation, raising questions about Tron’s technology and the military’s failure to sufficiently scrutinize it.
But key details regarding the performance of Tron’s system during procurement tests, of which it failed three in a row starting in October 2025, remained a mystery. Koo’s remarks last Thursday have now clarified some of that information.
The counter-drone system developed by Tron proved entirely ineffective on the battlefield, the ministry said, adding that both its passive radar and jamming systems had failed to detect and neutralize incoming aircraft.
According to the Defense Ministry, no taxpayer money ended up in Tron’s hands. That contrasts with an earlier deal, where a ministry-controlled research fund gave Tron more than NTD 22 million to develop the same radar technology it would later sell to the government.
The government chose Tron to develop the set of 26 counter-drone systems for Kinmen and Matsu in January 2025, after two previous rounds of tendering failed to deliver any suitable candidates. Domino Theory reported that foreign radar firms shied away from the project, believing the government’s specifications and price point to be unreasonable.
“We have done our best to build & test the product under our cost to serve the nation in a rightful and lawful way,” said Charity Lin (林雅媖), Tron’s vice president of strategic partnership, in an email response to request for comment.
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