News Maker - Anand Mahindra

Anand Mahindra, Vice Chairman, Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M), admits that he isn’t a sprightly young man anymore, but the 52-year-old has been tying up deals with a slew of international manufacturers— he has a car and utility vehicles tie-up with Renault—the group has denied reports that it is pulling out of its JV with the French company— and is planning to enter the commercial vehicle space in collaboration with International Truck & Motor (ITM).

However, as Mahindra himself has told this publication before, unless M&M can get some learnings out of a tie-up, the company will not enter into any joint-venture. This is a direct impact of M&M’s ill-fated joint-venture with Ford in the mid-1990s. As a minority partner, M&M felt it did not get a very good deal.

Mahindra, who has built up the utility business by hiring some ace engineers such as Pawan Goenka (who headed the Scorpio project) and Arun Jaura (who is developing M&M’s hybrid engines), might feel that M&M could be getting a raw deal with the proposed tie-up to manufacture vehicles with Renault-Nissan at Chennai. Mahindra has built up the utility vehicles business with the very clear objective of becoming a global leader in the space and the Renault deal will impart learnings to M&M to improve this crucial business segment in which it is a clear leader in this country. M&M has plans to start selling the Scorpio in the US and the new Scorpio ‘M-Hawk’ features a more efficient V-series engine for international markets.

Meanwhile, Mahindra is sitting pretty; apart from his flagship, he has a clutch of smaller companies in the technology and real estate industries that are adding great value to the Mahindra bottom line.

— Kushan Mitra