Business-The Times of India
In an interview to the TOI, the current poster boy of the global car industry, Renault’s CEO Carlos Ghosn and M&M’s charismatic managing director Anand Mahindra exuded an optimism that may well set the future for joint ventures in India’s fast growing automobile business.
And the no-nonsense, tough speaking Ghosn who has worked in the world’s three largest car markets__US, Europe and Japan was clearly in awe of Indian engineering. Why? Because they managed to shave 15% off the Logan’s production costs.
This is the kind of number that has Ghosn drooling. When the car was first thought up at Renault’s headquarters, it was meant to be a no-frills car that had to be built with as little resources as possible. Ghosn thought his company had done a pretty good job with it.
“But there is a thirst for learning here [in India] and that makes the Indian engineer innovate and create a product frugally. Engineers in other parts of the world always need more resources to do the same thing,” he said.
So is there a lesson in what he has seen for global automobile companies? “Yes,” says Ghosn. “They will have to show the humility to come into this country and learn. It isn’t possible to demonstrate such innovation when you work out of markets where resources are not at a premium,” he adds.
Suprised at lessons he’s learnt in India, Ghosn’s infatuation with frugality occupied most of the conversation. “Sure, capital costs are huge issue in this business. But we are discovering through our partnership with M&M that the level of investment for a specific objective can be done frugally.”
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Mahindra assembles its Cimarron 4×4 in Uruguay. Also, potential to sell its Scorpio SUV in LatAm. Scorpio was conceptualized and built for USD 150 million. At a fraction of the cost of other SUVs.
reportonbusiness.com:
Anand Mahindra was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year when Robert Lane, chairman of U.S. farm equipment concern Deere & Co., approached him.
“I’ve been to your dealerships and seen all your manuals,” he told Mr. Mahindra, whose Mumbai-based Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. has been taking on the maker of John Deere tractors in the U.S. market.
Well, replied Mr. Mahindra with a laugh, “that’s good news and bad news.”
The bad news is that the world’s biggest tractor maker has put Mahindra & Mahindra in its sights. The good news, both for Mr. Mahindra and India, is that a behemoth like John Deere is worried enough to bother.
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This is one of my key passions – to facilitate companies with a Gandhian engineering approach to their product portfolio to enter and serve previously ignored market segments in Latin America. Poster child for this approach – the Tata Nano car.
Definition of Gandhian engineering [via Innosight]: Gandhian engineering, or appropriate design, – a terrific mechanism for forcing product and business model development to cleave to the need profile of a target segment. After all, there is no greater predictor of disruptive success than products and business models that are designed around important and unsatisfied jobs to be done.
via Wired
A group of volunteer engineers are finishing the design for a home-brewed wind turbine that will bring electricity to off-the-grid Guatemalan villages by this summer.
After the U.S. engineers finish the design, local workers in the town of Quetzaltenango will manufacture the small-scale turbine. It will produce 10-15 watts of electricity, enough to charge a 12-volt battery that can power simple devices like LED lights.
The turbine was created by the Appropriate Technology Design Team of EWB’s San Francisco chapter. Team members like Malcolm Knapp and Heather Fleming spend their nights and weekends inside D2M’s design shop trying to perfect low-tech gadgets for people 2,500 miles away. D2M, which is Knapp and Fleming’s employer, donates the lab space for after-hours use by the EWB team.
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