India’s leading automaker Mahindra Group told CNBC’s Street Signs Asia program that it is not apprehensive about the potential entry of established global automakers like Tesla in its home market.
“We’ve seen tremendous competition in India over the last 20 years. So Tesla or anyone else coming in does not faze us.”
Anish Shah, Mahindra Group CEO, and Managing Director
The CEO further emphasized that the company managed to defend its dominant position in the domestic market despite the previous arrival of major automakers from across the world.
“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.”
Anish Shah, Mahindra Group CEO and Managing Director
For context, Tesla has been having important business meetings with Indian officials in the past few months. It solidifies most speculations that Tesla will build a new electric vehicle factory in the world’s third-largest automotive market.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk even confirmed it would “make significant investments in India” following his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi last June.
Mahindra continues to lead the Indian EV industry
CEO Anish Shah remarked that Mahindra has “not just survived but thrived” in the domestic market regardless of the strong competition it constantly faced.
In fact, the automaker controls almost 50% of the light commercial vehicle market and more than 40% of the farm equipment and tractor market.
Mahindra is poised to further strengthen its position in the Indian EV industry with fresh funding of $145 million from Singapore government-owned Temasek. In return, the investor will obtain a 3% share in Mahindra Electric Automobile Limited.
India to advance as a key EV market
Management consulting company Arthur Little expects the Indian electric vehicle industry to hit the 10 million sales milestone by the end of the decade.
“(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.”
Arthur Little, Management consulting company
It also emphasized that the country’s lack of charging infrastructures causes the adoption rate to stay at about 2% as of today.
See Also:
- Tesla and Indian government negotiations continue to progress
- Tesla executives met with an Indian investment agency for market entry negotiation
- India’s Pravaig Dynamics to develop an EV factory in Saudi Arabia
- Tesla to meet India’s commerce minister to discuss factory plan for the $24,000 EV
- India turns down BYD’s $1B factory proposal
All that said, the Indian EV industry has a high potential to thrive and compete in the global market. However, the government must develop and employ major initiatives to promote the shift and establish a local supply chain.
As noted by CEO Anish Shah, a local supply chain is crucial to support the automakers in the country in ramping up their EV production and deliveries.
“We do have a research center in India that develops a fair bit of technology as well. 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.”
Arthur Little, Management consulting company
It would undoubtedly be interesting to see how Mahindra and Tesla would compete in the Indian EV market once the latter finally arrives there.
