Saturday, April 20, 2013

Honda is out. Hero goes on... but with challenges multiplied! What next?

With Honda, Hero was growing in stature. Now that the Japanese are gone, questions are being raised on how well can Hero master in-house engine technology. Can Pawan Munjal silence his critics?
 
I n the Indian two-wheeler market during the 1980s, the closest you could get to being a rockstar was working for Bajaj Auto – the scooter maker. Thirty years later, much has changed. Bajaj no longer rules the minds of commuters in India. From occupying over 80% of the Indian two-wheeler market, the company today has a loose grip over only 18.15% of the category. Two reasons. Competition is the lesser excuse. Hero MotoCorp is the main. The Pawan Munjal-led giant controls 45.46% of the market, and at no hour seems to be losing the elasticity of its youth!

The company’s leader is an introvert. But that is where the shyness ends. Munjal, over the past few years has increasingly started to love sunlight. Today, at every new product launch, you can see the 57 year-old share his excitement with onlookers. Pawan Munjal, MD & CEO of Hero MotoCorp, is the new rock star of the Indian two-wheeler industry. His employees too, perhaps, feel the same. But many critics in the industry don’t feel as upbeat about his company. They are open about it. Some say that there isn’t much happening at Hero MotoCorp – not after Honda decided to abandon ship. Truth is – the Honda-goodbye was an important Munjal-plan that worked.

Those who are familiar with Munjal know this is true. According to him, the JV was proving a deterrent for the Hero Group to expand at a rate that it was capable of. Add to this, Honda’s presence not only meant allowing a future to shape up that had a crippled-for-technology Hero Group struggling with competition but also the fact that it had to play by Honda’s rulebook as far as expansion into international markets was concerned (implying a no-expansion policy for Hero in Asia & Latin America – markets where Honda bikes were sold).

And so it happened in December 2010. Honda was out. Eight months later, Hero Honda became rechristened as Hero MotoCorp, and there was apparently no happier a man in the whole of London (where the unveiling of the new identity was done) than Munjal. The launch of Hero-branded products like Impulse followed and the company ended 2011 on a happy note, with sales of 6.12 million units during CY2011 – a y-o-y growth of 19.2%. The numbers following the ouster of Honda looked encouraging. But questions were still being asked about the company’s future. “What will happen when Honda stops allowing Hero MotoCorp to use its technology in June 2014?” was the most common.

Munjal was silent for months. Then in the fourth week of February 2012, he spoke. He announced his company’s partnership with US-based two-wheeler manufacturing company Erik Buell Racing (EBR). The partnership was the answer to people who wondered what Hero would do after Honda. First, it will begin by borrowing technology to make its machines by paying a royalty that is lower than what it paid Honda (Rs.1.87 billion per quarter). Second, it will invest in R&D to create its own technological platforms to serve the global market starting mid-2014. Looks good on paper, but easier said than done.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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