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Context is everything.
Detailed stories on technology startups, business and economic current affairs.
Detailed stories on technology startups, business and economic current affairs.
A necessary clean-up is underway, with Mahindra & Mahindra rethinking how it allocates capital to businesses.
Editor's note: Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd has come a long way. The company began making automobiles with the earliest versions of the famous Willys jeep in newly independent India back in the late 1940s, when the country barely even had any metalled roads. M&M established for its vehicles a reputation that they were built to never fall apart, sturdy and reliable no matter where or how you drove them. Such was its position in the popular imagination that a typical Indian movie wouldn’t have ended until the villain’s Mahindra Bolero or Scorpio was blasted off the screen. What you were made to believe you could do with a Mahindra vehicle was take detours off the beaten path. For Anand Mahindra—a graduate student of filmmaking and architecture and the company’s charismatic chairman—that perhaps was the inspiration behind how he led India’s fourth-largest automaker, the Mahindra group’s flagship firm. He was perhaps sure nothing would happen to the company, started by his grandfather, no matter which direction he took it. And so, for years, he spearheaded one expansion, investment or acquisition after another. But …
FY26 numbers for the three major CV makers show resilience and all-around growth. This doesn’t look anything like the undifferentiated sector it once was.
The automaker that virtually created India’s electric car market is forced to offer record discounts, even as rivals surge and competition is set to get fiercer.
A revival in small-car sales has restored the automaker’s advantage, but tougher fuel-efficiency norms threaten to turn its greatest strength into a liability.
