MPW 2023: How Lakshmi Venu manages the legacies of two of south India’s oldest business families

With roots in two of the oldest business families of south India, Lakshmi Venu, who returns to BT’s Most Powerful Women in Business list this year after 2020, is straddling the towering legacies of both auto component maker Sundaram-Clayton and the billion-dollar tractor manufacturer TAFE.

At TAFE, a part of the light engineering conglomerate Amalgamations Group, she’s being primed to inherit the reins from her mother and CMD Mallika Srinivasan to oversee India’s second-largest tractor maker’s sprawling enterprise. As a Director of TAFE and Deputy MD of the wholly-owned subsidiary TAFE Motors and Tractors, which acquired some of Eicher’s business in 2005, she is building her muscle by interacting with farmers.

At Sundaram-Clayton, which was a part of the erstwhile $8.5-billion TVS Group, Lakshmi is well entrenched in all aspects of the business. She inherited an entry through her father and former CMD Venu Srinivasan. But it took her over 10 years to rise from the shop floor to the corner office. The Yale graduate’s strategic prowess was on display when she expanded the firm’s global footprint by setting up a foundry in South Carolina in the US in 2019, and cemented relationships with key OEMs such as Cummins, Hyundai, Volvo, Paccar and Daimler.

A multi-step demerger and restructuring of the erstwhile Sundaram-Clayton over the past year has put the next generation of the family firmly at the wheel. Venu is the MD of a modified Sundaram-Clayton that will be listed separately, while her younger brother Sudarshan Venu is the MD of TVS Motor Company’s parent TVS Holdings. This comes after the erstwhile TVS Group split amicably in 2022, leaving the four family branches—of T.S.Rajam, T.S. Krishna, T.S. Srinivasan and T.S. Santhanam and their dozens of businesses—to run their ventures separately, and independent of a holding company.

Meanwhile, Venu, the mother of two children, is navigating the complex terrains of both industries—as different as chalk and cheese—with the help of professional CEOs Vivek Joshi and Sandeep Sinha at Sundaram-Clayton and TAFE, respectively. She seems poised to continue playing an instrumental role in both companies and remain a force to be reckoned with in corporate India. 

@SaysVidya