Mahindra to be minority partner in any battery venture, e-XUV 300 launch by Q3, 2023

Auto major Mahindra and Mahindra ‘s top tier executives, while discussing its results at an analyst call, made some interesting observations on the firm’s EV and battery plans. On the results side, the firm had a strong Q3, reporting a 155 per cent jump in its standalone profit at Rs 1,353 crore for the December 2021 quarter as against Rs 531 crore logged during the same quarter last year.

The consolidated profit after tax (PAT) stood at Rs 1,987 crore for the December quarter, a jump of 57 per cent from Rs 1,268 crore over December 2020, thanks to higher demand for M&M’s commercial vehicles and farm equipment that offset an increase in costs owing to supply chain disruptions.

Overall revenues from operations for the quarter moved up 9 per cent to Rs 23,594 crore compared to Rs 21,626 crore in the corresponding quarter last year.

Meanwhile, consolidated revenue came in at Rs 15,239 crore, a jump of 8 per cent as against Rs 14,057 crore clocked in the year-ago quarter. The company’s EBITDA, however, fell 24 per cent to Rs 1,806 crore from Rs 2,386 crore during the same quarter last year.

ON EVs, the firm maintained that seeing a very strong growth on the EV three wheeler performance, which is highest ever quarterly billing and retail sales. The firm was optimistic about the trend and trajectory staying upwards from here as the market penetration of electric three wheeler increases.

The firm’s management highlighted a key win, on the issue of supply constraint of ICs from Malaysia, “Happy to say that we’ve identified new IC source. So that we are able to create fungibility across our products. And we are already seeing the benefit of that, as well as sourcing ICs from the open market, to help us create good reserve stocks, as a result of which we are seeing the benefit already coming in, in the early days of February. And that gives us a lot of confidence going forward. On the medium term, there are certain things that we’ve done on the product development front, especially looking at how do we remove complexities of multiple function ICs on the ECUs. And also look at alternate multi sourcing of components on the ECU front.”, said Veejay Nakra, CEO, Automotive Division.

On the firm’s plans for the PLI in battery space, Anish Shah, Managing Director and CEO said that ” the EV space still has a long way to play out. I’ve said earlier that we are likely in the first five or 10 overs of a test match. And what we’re looking at is how is battery technology evolving, who are potential partners that can come in and once we have all of that in place, then we will look at how we take that forward. So at this point in time we do not have full clarity on that but as soon as we do we will share that”.

Rajesh Jejurikar, ED, Auto and Farm Sectors added that ” in no scenario will we be taking a majority in setup. It is a potential play that we are considering depending on scenarios but we don’t intend to lead that”.

The firm hopes to launch its electric SUV the E-XUV 300 by the third quarter of 2023.