‘India can be auto manufacturing hub for world’, believes Mahindra CEO, says FTA opens up UK export market for EVs

Auto major Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) plans to export electric vehicles to the United Kingdom, leveraging the UK-India free-trade agreement (FTA), CEO and MD Anish Shah told PTI on August 13.

For this, the company’s plans to mobilise its Mahindra Advanced Design Europe (M.A.D.E) facility at Banbury, Oxfordshire (UK). The goal is to have EVs comprise 30 per cent of M&M total sales by 2030, as per the report.

‘UK-India FTA opens up our market’

“We are looking forward to exporting our EVs to the UK and to take a bigger share of the UK market and competing in the UK on the back of this FTA,” Shah said. He added that the Indian government has done a fine job when it comes to the trade agreement with the UK.

“It balances a large number of things. First, it helps open up our market in a way to goods coming in from the UK. Second, it helps us export a lot more across multiple industries,” he stated.

‘India can emerge as auto manufacturing hub of world’

CEO Shah told PTI that India has the potential to emerge as the automobile manufacturing hub of the world, and the company’s Oxfordshire facility serves as the conceptual hotbed for the company’s portfolio of electric products.

“If you take the automobile sector as a specific example, India has tremendous potential to be the auto manufacturing hub of the world…today, we are much smaller, but with what we are doing now, and also the focus on ease of business, on production of logistics costs, on production of import duties in some areas, we have started to see much greater ability for us to produce very high quality cars in India,” Shah said.

‘FTA should encourage innovation, manufacturing’

According to Shah, the FTA should be able to encourage innovation and manufacturing in the country.

He noted that when he says India can be a production hub, it is not only for the domestic firms but global automakers. “We want the best global automakers to be in India and produce in India. It will spur businesses. It will be better… more competition makes us better over time. So it’s very important for us to be able to have a very thriving auto industry in India, consumers having the choice of the best cars in the world,” Shah said.

On global competition, Shah noted, “We’ve not just survived. We’ve gotten better as we’ve had competition that came in, and today we are actually standing at a much stronger position. The company has very strong R&D capabilities in India. It can manufacture higher-quality vehicles at a lower cost than many of the global competitors. We think it’s good for India to have a thriving auto ecosystem, and that’s something that we feel is better for consumers and good for us.”

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