Anish Shah, the CEO and managing director of India’s largest automaker, the Mahindra Group, stated in an interview that the company is not concerned about foreign competitors like Tesla entering India’s very competitive electric vehicle industry.

“We’ve seen tremendous competition in India over the last 20 years. So Tesla or anyone else coming in does not faze us,” Shah said on “Street Signs Asia” Tuesday.

“At one point, Mahindra was written off when all the global majors were coming into India. Today, we continue to have the number one market share in SUVs from a revenue standpoint,” he added.

According to Reuters, Tesla is apparently exploring plans to enter the EV market in India, the third-largest car market in the world. 

Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, told Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June that he intends to “make significant investments in India.”

Shah claimed that despite stiff competition on a worldwide scale, Mahindra had “not just survived but thrived” in the Indian market.

“We have close to a 50% market share in the light commercial vehicle segment. We continue to have 40% plus market share in farm equipment and tractors,” the CEO said, adding the company expects to perform well in the coming years.

In its most recent fundraising effort, Mahindra last week collected $145 million from Singapore’s state-owned investor Temasek for its electric car subsidiary at a valuation of up to 805.8 billion Indian rupees ($9.8 billion). Mahindra Electric Automobile Limited’s EV unit will receive up to a 3% share from Temasek.

By 2027, the business projects that between 20% and 30% of all SUV sales will be electric vehicles.

India’s EV market “will cross sales of 10 million units by 2030, with an overall adoption rate of more than 30% across different vehicle classes,” according to a report last year by management consulting firm Arthur Little.

It stated the “absence of adequate EV infrastructure” was the reason adoption rates remained extremely low, at roughly 2% at the moment.

The report further stated that “it is important that India develops its own indigenous solutions and a supporting domestic value chain” in light of the current interruptions in the world’s supply chains and the government’s objective of making India self-sufficient.

According to Shah, “supply chain obviously is an important part” of the India EV business.

“We do have a research center in India that develops a fair bit of technology as well,” he said. “But the auto industry technology is global. To that extent, there is a dependence similarly with semiconductors. And we’ve seen some of the challenges in that in the last couple of years.”

(Adapted from FlipBoard.com)

Categories: Creativity, Economy & Finance, Regulations & Legal, Strategy, Uncategorized