Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/484201
INTERVIEW HERO MOTOCORP'S PAWAN MUNJAL P90 Republic, parts of Latin America and some African countries too, but then finally it all boiled down to just those four countries—Ban- gladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Colombia. Why Colombia? At that time we first went to Chile, then Peru, and then to Colombia which happened to be a good market where our prod- ucts took off well. The country was going through a difficult time because of the FARC guerrillas and the drug smugglers, but over time it's been improving, and now it's a very nice place to be in. How many employees does Hero MotoCorp have alto- gether? It's over 30,000 at present, but ramping up all the time. And how many factories do you have right now? We currently have four op- erational factories, all in India, with the fourth one inaugurated on October 21st last year. An- other factory is right now under construction in Colombia, and we should shortly start building a sixth in Bangladesh. Having said that, we already announced two more factories to be built in India, construction of which should start very soon, one in the state of Gujarat and the other in Andhra Pradesh. What is Hero MotoCorp's an- nual sales volume at present? In the last complete fiscal year of 2013/14 we sold 6.3 million two-wheelers, and during the months of September/October 2014—which in India is the peak selling season, with the festival of Diwali falling around this time— in the 37 days between Septem- ber 25th and October 31st we sold one million motorcycles and scooters. Which even by Hero's standards was really incredible. And that number was only in In- dia. It did not include exports, so it was exclusively the retail sales of our Indian dealer outlets. That's impressive, no doubt about it. So if Hero Honda was such a successful business, is that why Honda decided to break up the joint venture, to get a greater slice for itself? It was not Honda's decision to terminate the joint venture—I decided to do so. That's not widely under- stood. The common belief is that Honda broke it up be- cause it was so successful. Absolutely, the joint venture had been very successful. One of the most successful India- Japan joint ventures ever. Its success from the point of view of the business, revenues, profit- ability, products, everything to my mind was way beyond any of our business plans, better than any one of us had imagined the way this business could grow. Frankly, from where we started out in 1985 with the business plan that we formed then together with our partner, we never envisaged this size of a company. But the landscape changed over the past 25 years, the environment changed, the country changed, the global economy changed, yet the Hero The Indian manufacturer dominates, selling over six million powered two- wheelers annually.